HIPAA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule

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“The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.”
- George Bernard Shaw

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule protects the privacy of individually identifiable health information, and the confidentiality provisions of the Patient Safety Rule, which protect identifiable information being used to analyze patient safety events and improve patient safety.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule for the first time creates national standards to protect individuals’ medical records and other personal health information.

It gives patients more control over their health information.
It sets boundaries on the use and release of health records.
It establishes appropriate safeguards that health care providers and others must achieve to protect the privacy of health information.
It holds violators accountable, with civil and criminal penalties that can be imposed if they violate patients‘ privacy rights.
And it strikes a balance when public responsibility supports disclosure of some forms of data – for example, to protect public health.

For patients – it means being able to make informed choices when seeking care and reimbursement for care based on how personal health information may be used.

It enables patients to find out how their information may be used, and about certain disclosures of their information that have been made.
It generally limits release of information to the minimum reasonably needed for the purpose of the disclosure.
It generally gives patients the right to examine and obtain a copy of their own health records and request corrections.
It empowers individuals to control certain uses and disclosures of their health information.

If you are transmitting patient data across the Internet, the application and security architecture must provide end-to-end encryption so the data cannot be intercepted by anyone other than the intended recipient. In addition, the application and network must provide access control to allow viewing only by authorized people.

Every business that is part of the U.S. healthcare industry needs to comply with the federal standards regulating patient information. In addition to protecting worker health insurance coverage, HIPAA sets forth standards for protecting the integrity, confidentiality and availability of electronic health information. HHa eXxchange is a HIPAA-compliant application that can help your agency meet these guidelines.

The following matrix is based upon the HIPAA Security Standards rule published in the Federal Register on February 20, 2003 (45 CFR Parts 160, 162 and 164 Health Insurance Reform: Security Standards; Final Rule).

For more detailed information about health privacy, visit the “Medical Privacy: National Standards to
Protect the Privacy of Personal Health Information” site at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/