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Hipaa Privacy Rule

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Privacy Rules 1

Abstract

The wisdom of the HIPAA Privacy Rules was to create national standards to protect the

privacy of personal health information. This Rule took effect in April, 2003 and provides

protections to every patient whose information is collected, used or disclosed by covered entities.

The paper will provide information on HIPAA's Privacy Rules, the effect on medical providers

and patients. Also, it will give recommendations on how to improve the implementation of this

Rules.

Privacy Rules 2

BACKGROUND

"HIPAA" is an acronym for the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act

of1996 (August 21), Public Law 104-191, which amended the Internal Revenue Service

Code of 1986. Also known as the …show more content…

Although protecting individual privacy is a long-standing tradition among health-care providers and public health practitioners in the United States, previous legal protections at the federal, tribal, state, and local levels were inconsistent and inadequate. A patchwork of laws provided narrow privacy protections for selected health data and certain keepers of that data (Gostin).
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has addressed these concerns with new privacy standards that set a national minimum of basic protections, while balancing individual needs with those of society. The Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was adopted to ensure health insurance coverage after leaving an employer and also to provide standards for facilitating health-care--related electronic transactions. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health-care system, HIPAA included administrative simplification provisions that required DHHS to adopt national standards for electronic health-care transactions. At the same time, Congress recognized that advances in electronic technology could erode the privacy of health information. Consequently, Congress incorporated into HIPAA provisions that mandated adoption of federal privacy protections for certain individually identifiable health

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