Define HIPPA. Why is it important in this digital age?
The acronym HIPAA is used to stand for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Wu, Ahn, & Hu, 2012). It is a law in the US which is meant to offer standards of privacy aimed at protecting the medical records as well as other information regarding the patients, which is availed to doctors, health plans and other providers of healthcare. The importance of HIPAA is that it readily allows patients to access their medical records and it also extends the control of the patients concerning how their personal information on health is disclosed and also used. HIPAA levels the federal law concerned with the consumer protection privacy all across the U.S (Wu et al., 2012).
Refer to literature, or the state board of nursing, to find and discuss one example of healthcare professional misusing HIPAA information.
One case point of a healthcare professional having misused HIPAA information is a case which led to the implementation of some new minimum necessary policies regarding the telephone messages. An employee in one of the hospitals in the US was found not to have observed the minimum requirements that are necessary after she happened to leave a telephone message for a patient’s daughter. The message detailed both the treatment plan and medical condition of the patient (Wu et al., 2012). An investigation report from the OCR indicated that in this particular case the communications requirement were ignored, this is due to the fact that the patient had issued instructions to the health care staff involved to strictly contact her via her work telephone number.
Discuss how you as a nursing student can avoid HIPAA violations
References
Wu, R., Ahn, G.-J., & Hu, H. (2012). Towards HIPAA-compliant healthcare systems. Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGHIT Symposium on International Health Informatics - IHI ’12, 593.
