Health Insurance Portability And Affordability Act ( Hipaa )

Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPAA) Shoshana Weisberg Binghamton University Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPAA) President Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPPA) on August 21, 1996 (Hartley Jones, 2014, Chapter 1). To understand what this act is, a definition of â€Å"portability† and â€Å"affordability† must be provided. Portability guarantees that an employee could obtain health insurance if he or she changed jobs (Hartley Jones, 2014, Chapter 1). Affordability was to tackle the messy administrative system in health care going on at the time. This was addressed by developing the rules of privacy, security, transactions and code sets, and†¦show more content†¦Respecting the patients’ privacy has always been an important aspect of the physicians practice. This is because health related matters are often private and no patient would want their private information accessible to anyone other than those directly involved in their case. The goals of HIPAA are to increase patient health information use and disclosure contro l, increase patient access to their records, limit health information use, secure transactions and storage, and establish legal accountabilities and penalties (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 186). In the post HIPAA environment there are less opportunities for the wrong people to get their hands on patient records. The information obtained at each patient flow checkpoint is broken up so that the information that is specifically needed for each department is available for only that department. For example, billing information gets sent and stored in a financial database (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 189). The billing employees only see the data related to the billing and not medical, treatment, or procedure specifics. Mainly, patients want to know what a physician is doing to protect their privacy (Hartley Jones, 2014, Chapter 5). There is usually a reason as to why a patient expresses extra concern regarding his privacy. For example: A teenager is experimenting with drugs and calls the offi ce for help, a man tests positive for hepatitis C and feels like he may lose his job,