The introduction of the HIPAA affected organizations. The Act brought a new order in healthcare industry. With the introduction of the Act, healthcare organizations were expected to evolve from a cottage type industry to a new industry contributing to advanced medical research (Califf and Muhlbaier, 2003). The healthcare organizations were either to comply with HIPPA or risk facing severe penalties including but not limited to criminal prosecutions and fines. Implementation of HIPAA guidelines came at a cost. Organizations had to invest a lot of resources and implement organizational changes to meet the requirements. For example, transitioning from paper records to paperless records was going to be an expensive endeavor. Budgetary allocations was required to acquire new systems, train current employees, and even employ more. Organizations had to interpret and draft customized version of HIPAA suited to their nature of operations. Organizations also had to set their own deadlines to comply with the set deadlines for HIPAA guidelines (Dwyer, Weaver, and Hughes, 2004).
Internal factors affect change in healthcare organizations. HIPAA aimed to act as a guidance for transition in the healthcare industry from traditional practice to a new way of doing things. Califf and Muhlbaier (2003) pointed out that the ultimate outcome of HIPAA was largely dependent on the approach pursued by the medical community. These went down to the internal factors in the health organizations such as clinical research, clinical practice, and health-services research. Previous studies suggest that medical practice had been largely unsystematic especially in areas such as attention to nomenclature. Evidence also suggest that the developments in other departments like billing system have not been in line with developments in other departments such s clinical system. This indicate business developments in healthcare organizations lacked any relationship with actual delivery of healthcare. While the internet and IT had brought revolution in the nonmedical world such as banking, it was yet to bring any major impact in the healthcare sector. The banking industry had adopted a data standard and common nomenclature while the medical world lacked any standardization in its data management. For example, records for billing, clinical records, and research are different with no standards across organizations and government. To bring an overall organizational change, internal factors such as adoption of common nomenclature of record keeping had to be adopted. It also involved investing in advanced technologies such as IT systems. Further, it involved training of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, accountants, and everybody in the organization to be conversant with the new systems and new ways of doing things.
References
Califf, R. M., & Muhlbaier, L. H. (2003). Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Must There Be a Trade-Off Between Privacy and Quality of Health Care, or Can We Advance Both? Circulation, 108(8), 915-918.
Dwyer III, S. J., Weaver, A. C., & Hughes, K. K. (2004). Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Security Issues in the Digital Medical Enterprise, 72(2), 9-18.
