mercredi 5 juin 2013

How HIPAA Consulting Saved The Medical Industry

By Lora Jones


When HIPAA was brought to the medical industry it was a welcomed and needed addition to the already policy heavy industry. Because of how much was involved with it and how many changes would take place as a result of it HIPAA consulting agencies were needed to help medical offices and hospitals get up to speed.

HIPAA stand for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is a great thing for patients because it dictates who can look at your records and when. Who is allowed to get or request your records and also the way communications are handled between doctors and doctors offices. Communication was going to be an issue because doctors were use to just sending over charts and records based on another doctors request. Now it will require the patient to become involved.

Doctors might be great with patients and their need for help, but when it comes to paperwork and documents and things of that nature you can forget it, they get lost very quickly. It is mainly because their entire career they have nurses and receptionists and aids taking care of every little bit of that paperwork.

This was a change that needed to be implemented right away and the government was taking infractions very seriously. This entire act basically centered around patient privacy. Keeping their conditions private, their records, and anything else concerning everything they are doing at the hospital or doctor's office.

Patient rights is a very important factor in where government funding goes and where the community decides to go for their medical needs. When these HIPAA laws became effective the places that were prepared were able to hit the ground running and get their staff under control and trained on how to properly administer the new paperwork.

There were some other common sense issues brought to the attention of staffers and medical professionals as well while the consulting agents were helping out. Patients names were not called out in waiting rooms for all to hear and charts are kept private and only the patient has the power to allow access to records.

Many of the policies that did not deal directly with the patient records and how they can be accessed were regarding the best practices or the proper ways for thing to take place. Like the aforementioned patient paging and medical charts. Other systems include sign in sheets for handing out HIPAA forms, keeping other documents confidential, and a system to alert staff to changes made in a record.

People thought this would be just another form to hand out and boy were they mistaken. HIPAA consulting might have saved the medical industry from taking five large steps in the wrong direction. As difficult as it all may have been we as patients are all better for it. We no longer will have issues with the wrong people getting our records. IT is even difficult for us to get our own sometimes, but that is a good thing because it is that hard or harder for everyone else.




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