When was HIPAA enacted and what were the compliance dates for the original act and its subsequent amendments? One of the key aims of the legislation was to improve the portability health insurance coverage — Ensuring employees retained health insurance coverage when between jobs.
HIPAA also made healthcare organizations accountable for health data and helped to ensure health information remains private and confidential. HIPAA also combated wastage in healthcare and helped to prevent fraud and abuse in healthcare delivery and health insurance, while also simplifying the administration of healthcare. These updates added many new provisions to HIPAA legislation and helped to ensure that patient privacy was protected, healthcare data was appropriately secured, patients and plan members were notified in the event of a breach of their protected health information, and business associates of HIPAA covered entities also had to comply with HIPAA Rules.
According to an article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, HIPAA was initially created with two main goals: To make health care delivery more efficient, and to increase the number of Americans with health insurance coverage. One way this was accomplished was by creating a standard for electronic health records. This allowed patients to change doctors, leave jobs, switch insurance, etc.
But HIPAA also made health records more accessible, which in turn led to a greater need for privacy laws, so attendant privacy regulations were proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services HHS in and finalized the following year.
HIPAA has a long and complicated history the legislation was signed into law in but was continually tinkered with for the next decade that started when hospitals started switching from paper to digital records. Fact Checks. Data can be encrypted with single security key access or with separate keys for encryption and decryption symmetric and asymmetric data encryption. If a mobile device is lost or stolen or if computer networks are hacked, while this will be considered a security breach, it would not be a HIPAA violation unless the access key is also disclosed.
The healthcare industry and the pager appear almost inseparable, yet this is about to change. All mobile devices transmit data over unsecured networks and therefore rely on the users not sending ePHI. BYOD schemes have now been introduced by many healthcare providers, although modern mobile devices have even greater potential to cause HIPAA violations due to the ease at which personal identifiers and ePHI can be sent.
Policies and procedures may be put in place to control how these devices are used, although surveys suggest that in practice many medical professionals are still using the devices to communicate ePHI.
Secure messaging solutions prevent this. They work by maintaining ePHI on a secure database and then allowing authorized medical professionals to access the data via downloadable secure messaging apps. Communications are channeled through a secure messaging platform which has administrative controls in place to monitor the activity of the authorized personnel. Many healthcare organizations have reported that the implementation of secure messaging solutions has increased productivity by streamlining communications, increasing message accountability and accelerating response times.
According to studies conducted in HIPAA-compliant medical facilities, efficiency has also increased, resulting in a higher standard of healthcare being delivered to patients. The move from physical health records to electronic data formats has required considerable investment in IT infrastructure.
The demands placed on healthcare organizations to continually upgrade servers and networks, and employ the staff to manage data centers, can be considerable. In addition to the hardware, space must be devoted to storing the equipment and physical controls must be used to control access.
The computer equipment now required to run large networks and store healthcare data requires cooling systems to be installed to dissipate the heat the equipment generates. The most cost effective solution for many healthcare providers is to outsource data storage and take advantage of the cloud to store data. HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting employs the appropriate controls to secure all stored data with encryption.
Mobile health apps are popular with patients for tracking and monitoring health and fitness, and wearable devices have potential to revolutionize home healthcare.
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