Understanding HIPPA Guidelines

Posted by Prakash on January 6th, 2010 529 Comments Printer-Friendly

One of the most important things that you must have in mind when you practice Medical Transcription is the HIPPA Guidelines. These guidelines are there to keep privacy among the person. These guidelines are specially created for all the Medical Transcriptionists to be able to keep privacy between the physician and the patient. First of all, you must know what exactly HIPPA means – Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This act was created in 1996 and is required for the adoption of federal regulations governing the privacy of health information. All of these regulations are created to help all the people in the world to keep all of their health information private.

The HIPPA rules are applied for all the organization and institutions that are offering any type of health care. All of those institutions must meet the definition-covered entity, which defined as any health care provider, health plans or health care clearing house that will transmit any health information in the electronic form. The health care provider is an agency that provides health care and services, which are related to preventive, diagnostic, rehabilitative, or maintenance care and counseling. A health plan is any individual or group plan, which provides medical care. If you know what all of these institutions are, you will be able to properly understand whom HIPPA guidelines are covering. Most of the people have the personal health info with healthcare providers, as well as all these rules establish the guidelines and the standards for use & disclosure of personal health information.

Next you must know what type of information is protected by HIPPA, because that is important if you want to understand all the requirements that are set in that act. Mainly, any type of medical information is protected. The main function of HIPPA rules is limiting the situations, in which the personal health information gets shared to people Medical information is any information that concerns individual or a group of individual’s health status. And it is very important to protect the privacy of both doctor and patient. Act greatly limits dissemination as well as a transmittal of the personal patient information & has affected in a way the healthcare information is been handled. HIPAA rules have tried to restrict use of the preexisting condition exclusions, and make some special enrollment periods & prohibit discrimination that is based on the health status conditions in the enrolment & premiums.

There is no matter how the health information is transmitted, because the HIPPA is created to protect electronically and manually transmitted health information. Also important to know is that all the past and future health information is protected, which means that as a Medical Transcriptionist you must make everything possible to protect all the information you have access to, and also you must avoid sharing that information with anyone except the physician, whose patient information you are reviewing. This is one important thing that you need to keep in mind, before you get the degree of Medical Transcriptionist. All over the world, there are HIPPA rules, and if you break them, there is a serious chance that you will have some serious legal problems. If these bigger entities are been covered by HIPAA privacy rules, and they must have adopted the privacy policies and the practices, which comply with all these rules.

The basic definition of the HIPPA rules is to limit all the circumstances, which may lead to share individual’s health information. There are only limited numbers of situations where you will have to access other people’s health information and one of them are if you are certified medical transcriptionist. However, to be able to see all the information, there is in the HIPPA guidelines, my advice is to search the internet, because there are many websites that are offering the whole version of that act. If you do not get it then you search for the list of companies that are having the HIPPA guidelines. These guidelines need to be practiced by every single Medical Transcriptionist. Have in mind that this is one of the most important government regulations that concern the medical transcription, and you must be familiar with it.

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