What is HIPAA?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is an extensive Federal law that was passed in 1996, with a phased in implementation process. The law applies to all health professions throughout the country.

The law was established to originally address the portability of a person’s health insurance if they changed jobs. The accountability portion of the law addresses many facets of patient privacy of health information for all providers and facilities.

Non-compliance of this law can create major disruption to your office and you could be sanctioned if you are found to be out of compliance.

The Federal Department of Labor is the regulating agency and further information can be found at this website: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/

Lawyers for health care practioners are getting ready to defend against federal audits of health care practitioners and hospitals for compliance with HIPAA security regulations. While HIPAA compliance is scalable, if you have not done a self-audit of your clinic or facility, now is the time. Also, if you have not trained you staff as required by HIPAA, Health Care Compliance Strategies has an interactive course to train staff in HIPAA Privacy and Security which has been updated within recent months. To sign up for HIPAA training please go to www.peickconniff.com and click on the link for HIPAA Training.