Why should every medical practice be HIPAA compliant?
The HIPAA act is a regulation that sees to it that healthcare professionals, insurance enterprises and other medical practitioners understand the importance of handling, transmitting, and safeguarding the usage of patient information in the best possible manner. Being HIPAA compliant means having to abide as per its stringent regulatory measures and comprehending the importance of the security of patient health information. The act covers all issues regarding healthcare medical insurance, abuse of patient health information and it provides decided guidelines that can ably protect the interests of patients. To have a trouble-free medical practice, medical practitioners need to ensure that they are HIPAA compliant.
HIPAA standardizes healthcare transactions and understands the problems that patients may face. It therefore also includes some regulations about tax security for health savings accounts. It also has certain specifications that direct specific people on the way to handle life insurance premium deductions from tax returns. Medical practitioners should ensure that their systems are updated as per the HIPAA regulations to avoid any sort of security breaches that may compromise any sort of patient information data. So even if you are a thriving private medical practitioner you would do well to ensure that only your authorized personnel have access to patient health information and they too should be made to understand the importance of the rules of regulatory healthcare compliance. In case your staff are new to the concept it becomes the duty of the medical practitioner to ensure that the staff are educated about the different measures and different ways to protect patient information and also caution them regarding the abuse of such information that can have disastrous results for the practitioner as well as the practice itself.
Additionally, all staff dealing with such information should be made to understand that any kind of unsuitable disclosure of confidential health information of patient can be dangerous for them as well, wherein they could be held liable for abuse of patient information and be dishonorably discharged from their duties and also be asked to pay penalties for the same. The penalties that medical practitioners have to face can be pretty serious; it can range from fines of close to $25,000 a year for different violations to even $250,000. In some cases the offending parties can be imprisoned as well that could go to as high as 10 years in prison especially in cases where in there is glaring evidence of deliberate abuse of the confidential patient health data and information.
Given such serious penalties it is better that every medical practitioner understands the importance of being HIPAA compliant and therefore employs the necessary solutions and systems to maintain a healthcare regulatory compliant medical practice.
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