Laws Related to PHI
Protected Health Information constitutes an individual’s medical history, including their diagnosis, treatment, insurance coverage, and even their date of birth. Sensitive patient health information must be protected against disclosure without the patient’s agreement or knowledge. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal legislation that mandated the developing of such national standards.
All healthcare staff members should be familiar with the five main HIPAA regulations. Patients can inspect and get a copy of their medical records and request file adjustments under the data protection act. The regulatory law describes and regulates the standards, guidelines, and techniques for protecting electronic PHI on storage (Moore & Frye, 2019). The transaction rule also deals with the transaction and code established in HIPAA transactions, such as ICD 9 and 10 codes. The identifiers rule uses identifiers for insurance entities, such as the National Provider Identifier and National Health Plan; this raises and sets penalties for violations.
Interdisciplinary Collaborations
Patient-protected health information (PHI) requires the concerted effort of the entire healthcare team, which must be well-versed in the dos and don’ts of electronic health records to keep their patients’ data secure. In the event of a HIPAA violation, a facility may be subject to fines totaling millions of dollars. Loss of privileges or sanctions may result from this. The Joint Commission has guided attempts to make clinicians utilize health information technology more appropriately and safely (Cohen & Mello, 2018). The measures taken include analyzing workflow process, system design, modifications, potential hazard identification, and user systems, which promote practitioner cognitive work. Nurses are subject to various electronic reminders, including dashboards, worklists, order lists, pop-up reminders, and care plan interventions, all of which must be completed.
Evidence-Based Approaches
There is a critical need for hospitals to provide training for medical staff on HIPAA compliance and the simplest approaches to avoid infractions. When minimizing HIPAA violations and penalties, it is important to maintain up-to-date resources, manuals, and training programs. The staff will be educated on the dos and don’ts of PHI handling and disclosure. The training includes medical record handling, lost or stolen devices, texting patient information, social media, unauthorized access to medical files, social infringements, authorization requirements, and access to a patient’s data on home computers as part of these training.
Effective Staff Updates
HIPAA compliance is best achieved by providing at least annual employee training and recruit orientation. Protecting protected health information (PHI) can be done in several ways, including setting up email alerts to be sent if there have been significant developments and types of potential service security threats, informing IT of new variants of ransomware, malware, and other bad applications that may affect the system and expose patient information, and using a separate computer on networks that are vulnerable to attacks (Choi & Williams, 2022). Understanding how to manage patient data and information properly is crucial. One technique to protect patients’ personal information is to lock up medical charts and electronic data after use.
Security breaches involving patients’ medical records have been linked to the use of textual media. It may seem to use innocent to take pictures of patients and publish them on social media or SMS patient information to physicians, but cybercriminals can quickly obtain this information. Encrypted applications allow private information to be viewed securely on wireless devices but must be filed on all devices involved (Baumann et al., 2018). In addition, medical personnel should report lost or stolen devices that contain patient information right away and take extra precautions to ensure their passwords are secure by not sharing them with anybody. It is acceptable to view patient records only when doing so is necessary for providing patient records that should not be accessed illegally, even for curiosity or to help a friend or family member because doing so violates HIPAA.
References
Moore, W., & Frye, S. (2019). Review of HIPAA, Part 1: History, protected health information, and privacy and security rules. Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology, 47(4), 269–272. https://doi.org/10.2967/jnmt.119.227819
Cohen, I. G., & Mello, M. M. (2018). HIPAA and protecting health information in the 21st century. Jama, 320(3), 231-232.https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2018.5630
Choi, Y. B., & Williams, C. E. (2022). A HIPAA security and privacy compliance audit and risk assessment mitigation approach. In Research Anthology on Securing Medical Systems and Records (pp. 706–725). IGI Global. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-6311-6.ch032
Baumann, L. A., Baker, J., & Elshaug, A. G. (2018). The impact of electronic health record systems on clinical documentation times: A systematic review. Health policy, 122(8), 827-836. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2018.05.014
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