›› HIPAA and Information Technology

The complexities of The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)  framework of rules and regulations together with the stringent security and privacy requirements, has made Information technology the hero of HIPAA compliance. Without the Information technology getting involved in HIPAA compliances, ensuring compliance to HIPAA would be Impossible. For ensuring the privacy and security of patient data, IT has come forward with HIPAA complaint software which employ highly complex digital encryption technologies normally never used in business environment to provide military grade security to the data.

Technological advancements like EDI (electronic data interchange) has provided so much convenience to the service providers who can now submit their claims to the insurers through EDI and even receive payments directly into their banks. All major hospitals and health care provided have medical records of their patient s stored in electronic format. How HIPAA requires that these systems which handle the patients records must comply with the HIPAA security and privacy regulations. Here comes the HIPAA compliant EMR or the electronic medical records software which keeps all the patient histories in digital format accessible to all relevant and authorized persons as per the guide lines of HIPAA. Even four after the HIPAA has come into force; only seven percent of the Hospitals have HIPAA compliant EMR.

At the time when The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)   came into force the technology was not so advanced. All it provided was for the use of EDI and data security guaranteeing privacy of the patient’s data and provisioning of a regulatory framework for the management of a patient’s data. After a decade of HIPAA compliance we can look ford to web enabling HIPAA covered entities so that the patient need not even visit the medical office for verifying his own data.