What Should You Know About Hippa?
Online Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) training is a good accomplishment for any healthcare skilled to have under their belt.
Anytime a healthcare representative is dealing with patients you want them to treat the patient as professionally as possible. Treating patients with care and protecting their privacy is extremely important. By becoming familiar with the HIPPA regulations you are going to keep from exploiting any of their personal information. By supplying yourself or your employees with on-line training you are going to additional extend their education. By having your employees total HIPPA-trained they’ll see how the HIPPA guidelines and regulations pertain to their job.
It is incredible that the U.S. Congress passed such a strong bill when they passed the HIPPA regulations for medical privacy. Why you ask?
Well, when it comes to individual privacy in the United States, it seems that our elected representatives are busy invading our privacy, not protecting it. Therefore, there must be a lot more to the story… let me explain.
In governing the use and disclosure of protected health information, HIPAA allows covered entities to use and disclose protected health information without consent or notice for treatment, payment, and health care operations purposes (45 C.F.R. § 164.506). The uses and disclosures include providing highly detailed protected health information to business associates to assist with permissible categories.
Various arrangements between Google and systems including the Mayo Clinic, University of Chicago, and Ascension make it possible for Google to have access to personal information about millions of individuals. Google has been secretly working with Ascension, the second-largest health system in the nation, on an initiative code-named “Project Nightingale” to gather millions of patient records across 21 states since 2018 reports The Wall Street Journal.
Google is able to do this, not by sidestepping HIPAA but by following its regulatory requirements as a business associate to support the mission of the health care facility. Ascension is shifting its infrastructure to private environments maintained by Google, using Google productivity tools (the professional G-Suite is mostly HIPAA compliant), and extending tools designed to help improve clinical quality. Not unsurprisingly, one of the expected outcomes from these efforts is to enhance revenue, which means enabling Ascension to make more money.
Was it really about medical records privacy, or was it passed to assist in covering up an industries environmental concerns?
How so you ask, well, by leaving no access to possible cancer clusters information and facts for studies. Healthcare research was made much more difficult because of HIPPA. Researchers within a healthcare organization are severely hampered because they cannot freely do studies based on patient chart data, unless the patient releases that information to them. About the very same time, it was discovered that an additive used for fuel had leaked into the groundwater, and may expose oil firms to huge penalties. Congress went out of their way, because indeed it was their fault, to shield big oil organizations from lawsuit exposure because of the effects of their pollution with these additives.
In fact, it may have been billed as privacy of the medical records to guard you against insurance firms raising your rates based on information they gleaned from your medical records. But the reality is you release your medical records to insurance companies all of the time once you sign up for medical insurance.
Now it’s true that many people today do not want their private medical records available for anyone to see. On the other hand having all that data available to researchers can help keep the United States one of the most healthiest places in the world. There is a strong argument that we still need that data inside the public domain, and we can via anonymizing it.