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The Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act Of 1996

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The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 was legislation enacted with a dual purpose: to assure the insurability of more Americans, and protect them from demographics and medical treatment information being accessible to too many individuals and entities, specifically those who do not have necessity to know. The Insurance Portability portion essentially reduced the impact pre-existing conditions have on obtaining health insurance. The law drastically limits when an insurance plan can allow denial of services for pre-existing conditions, and in most cases, such as when a person is able to secure continuous medical coverage, obliterates it. For instance, if a worker is laid off from his job, but continues to purchase …show more content…

There are several parts that make up the privacy portion of HIPAA, all of which are enforced by the Office of Civil Rights. There is the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which outlines the steps organizations should take to protect the medical records and health information of patients; the HIPAA Security Rule, protecting electronic medical records; the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, which mandates that certain healthcare organizations and businesses report breaches of personal health information; and the privacy portion of the Patient Safety Rule, which disallows identifiers of specific patients in reviewing safety and clinical quality events (Health Information Privacy, n.d.). The privacy portion of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is a substantial portion of the law that has indeed gained the most attention and had the widest impacts – more so even than the insurance portability portion. The rules that make up the privacy piece of the law are intended to protect patients from having information about their medical history and medical care released to anyone that doesn’t have a right to know. The Security Rule supports the Privacy Rule in how it affects technological advances in healthcare – specifically, electronic medical records: Electronic Medical Records or Electronic Health Records (EMR’s or EHR’s, respectively). The Breach Notification Rule supports patients’ privacy not only by mandating reporting to

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