HIPPA and HIM

HIPPA and HIM

Abstract

Currently the healthcare industry in the US is not only contending with a great pressures to lower costs while maintaining the quality of service but is also under a stringent timeline to become compliant with the health insurance, portability and accountability act (HIPAA) regulatory requirements. Robust healthcare information systems (HCIS) become critical to enabling healthcare organizations address these challenges. Hence, it becomes an imperative need that the information that is captured, generated and disseminated by these HCIS be of the highest possible integrity and quality as well as compliant with regulatory requirements. This paper addresses this need by proposing an integrative framework for HIPAA compliant, I*IQ HCIS. It bases this framework on an integration of the requirements for HIPAA compliance, the principles of information integrity, as well as the healthcare quality aims set forth by the Committee on the Quality of Healthcare in America.

HIPPA and HIM

Current Information System

The Administrative Simplification provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA, Title II) required the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health plans, and employers. It also addressed the security and privacy of health data. As the industry adopts these standards for the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's health care system will improve the use of electronic data interchange.

The 3M Health Information Systems HIPAA Program Office provides a single point of contact for inquiries and responses to questions regarding HIPAA, and oversees HIPAA activities for 3M HIS products and services, including:

Assessments of 3M products and services against HIPAA rules

Development and execution of standard policies and procedures for HIPAA compliance as a business associate to our customers

3M and the 3M Health Information Systems HIPAA Program Office actively participate with governmental agencies, industry groups, and most importantly clients, to position 3M to meet, and to help our clients meet, the challenges of promoting compliance with HIPAA regulations.

There has always been a clear moral and ethical obligation for Health Information Management (HIM) professionals to protect privacy. In 1934, the visionary leader of the HIM profession, Grace Whiting Myers, recognized the moral imperative to protect patient privacy and wrote a pledge which indicated that no clinical information should be given to anyone, except as authorized. This professional value and obligation have been reinforced through several iterations of a professional code of ethics, including the most recent one (AHIMA Code of Ethics, 2004). Today, HIPAA provides increased protection for patient privacy as patients themselves need to authorize the release of their health information.

Information System Maintanance

Privacy is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution. Each state can also have its own legislation that affects access to patient information, and there are differences between these state statutes. We might ask why this legislation was passed in the first place, since there are existing state laws, and health care professionals have always worked to protect patient ...