HIPAA Privacy Standards
In enacting HIPAA, Congress mandated the establishment of standards for the privacy of individually-identifiable health information. As required by HIPAA, the final regulation covers health plans, health care clearinghouses, and those health care providers who conduct certain financial and administrative transactions (e.g., electronic billing and funds transfers) electronically.
The compliance date for HIPAA's privacy standards was April 14, 2003.
For more information, please see the HHS Fact Sheet located at: http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/admnsimp/final/pvcfact2.htm
We believe DSI has a three-fold responsibility to clients and their patients with regard to privacy:
- To take all reasonable steps to ensure that our actively supported software applications comply with the relevant portions of HIPAA.
- To issue written guidelines that will assist our clients in their effort to comply with HIPAA.
- To protect the privacy of health information contained in software databases provided to us by our clients for any reason: conversion of data from legacy systems, troubleshooting technical issues that may arise, and the like.
The privacy regulation is largely comprised of administrative, rather than technical, issues. Healthcare providers, as well as DSI and its business partners (to the extent that we and our partners have access to private healthcare information) are required under HIPAA to document and implement administrative policies, procedures and training in order to comply strictly with the regulations.
elligence's Security Features and Reporting Engine help you make sure that your office complies with the HIPAA privacy standards, by tracking each access to Protected Healthcare Information (PHI).