Everything You Ought to Know About HIPAA and HIPAA Compliance

It’s a federal law enacted in 1996 in an effort at incremental medical care reform and specialists believe it to be the most important healthcare legislation since Medicare in 1965.

HIPAA’s intent would be to reform the medical sector by reducing costs, simplifying administrative procedures and burdens, technology and compliance and enhancing privacy and safety of individual’s information.

There are two different and different legislation which fall under the HIPAA umbrella: HIPAA Privacy and HIPAA Security. HIPAA Privacy relates to the privacy and protection of individuals’ protected health information (PHI) while HIPAA safety is related to the privacy and protection of all individuals’ protected health information in electronic form (ePHI). HIPAA Privacy is what most people think about when we hear the expression HIPAA ( HIPAA Awareness Training, Notice of Privacy Practices, Authorization types, etc )whereas HIPAA Security will be the focus of a company’s IT department since it copes with encryption, digital security, disaster recovery, etc..

Do you need to be worried about HIPAA? Covered Entities are such kinds of organizations/individuals that deal directly with secure health information and include health care providers, technology and hipaa compliance medical insurance providers, and company sponsored group health plans. Anyone out of these categories is known as a business partner. Business partners include medical billing companies, medical storage, advertising organizations, software providers, medical device manufacturers, etc..