| The Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a multifaceted collection of federal
statutes that addresses portability of health insurance, administrative
simplification, privacy, and security of health information. Professional
Pathology Services, PC is 100 percent HIPAA compliant. HIPAA is being
implemented in two phases. The first phase, the Privacy phase was
implemented in early 2003. This phase limits the amount of a patient’s
protected health information (PHI) being released and provides rules
for disclosure of PHI for health care institutions. The second phase,
the security phase, was implemented in early 2005 and focuses
more on the actual physical security of healthcare information. This
relates to password requirements, physical access, and encryption
standards.
HIPAA requires the completion of patient or physician authorizations
to release medical records. While this has lead to increased
paperwork and other measures in some environments, the benefit
to the patient has already been felt. The nature of HIPAA and
the fact that organizations have interpreted HIPAA differently
has led to varying degrees of security and required paperwork
across hospitals, doctor’s offices, and labs. PPS, PC has
tried to achieve the proper mix of authorization and common sense
when releasing its PHI to other institutions.
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