HIPAA is an acronym for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA allows you to receive continuous coverage while changing or losing jobs by requiring group health plans and insurers to cover individuals who have an interruption in their employer-sponsored coverage. Resources include a guide, frequently asked questions, and an outline of covered entities and business associates.
HIPAA is a national standard that requires protecting all personal information at every stage of its handling – from initial collection to its final disposal. It is a federal law enacted in 1996 to improve health insurance’s administrative efficiency, increase the competitiveness of the health insurance market, and assure a robust and viable health care delivery system that meets the needs of all Americans.
The law defines the privacy and security standards for protecting medical information. HIPAA is designed to help people better manage their healthcare and remain healthy.
What is the goal of HIPAA?
Its primary objective was to protect the continuity of health insurance coverage for people with individual health insurance or group health plans that are not provided through an employer.
The HIPAA compliance policies help you seamlessly integrate with health plans to achieve compliance standards using coding, messaging, data export, and preliminary routing for certain specialty services. It enables you to free up valuable staff time while ensuring that all nursing documentation is complete and accurate, all without breaking the bank.
HIPAA is a complex piece of legislation (or set of rules) that protects us from abuses such as insurance companies denying coverage if your condition is pre-existing. It has several provisions, ranging from health information privacy to the creation of medical savings accounts.
HIPAA concerns the privacy and security of individually identifiable health information and the related administrative, technical, and physical safeguards that must be in place to protect such information.
The Privacy and Security rule
HIPAA Privacy Rule provides detailed, no-nonsense guidance on implementing its requirements. This concise guide clarifies how PHI can be used and disclosed by covered entities and what protections apply when it is.
The HIPAA Security Rule is an administrative simplification that enables healthcare providers, health plans, and other entities covered by the Privacy Rule (Covered Entities) to provide their business associates with access to electronically protected health information (e-PHI) in a manner that does not compromise the security or privacy of e-PHI.
Conclusion
The purpose of HIPAA is to ensure that all individuals’ private health information is kept safe and secure so that each individual can make informed decisions about their health and the information they choose to share about it. It was aimed at improving the portability of health insurance and protecting the privacy of patients. The primary purpose was to standardize everyone’s health insurance plan across the nation.
This Rule guarantees that individually identifiable health information will be adequately protected. The Rule gives patients an array of necessary rights concerning their personal health information, including the right to inspect and copy.
