The Acronym Hipaa Stands For

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

1996

1. Make health insurance more portable (helping workers/families to keep coverage with job changes) 2. Reduce healthcare fraud and abuse (which wastes 1/3 of every healthcare dollar 3. Improve efficiency and effectiveness (of payments and o/ transactions) 4. Protect the privacy and security of medical records 5. Build statistical data for analysis (to better understand diseases and how the spread)

Any doctor's office, clinic, hospital, nursing home, or other entity that is covereed under HIPAA law. aka CE's. Have to meet certain conditions to be covered. Nearly every healthcare provider in USA is CE

PHI. Patients' medical/billing records protected under HIPAA. Covers past, present, or future. Can be written, printed, recorded, photographed, or oral. Must be destroyed by burning or cross-cut shredding.

ePHI. Any PHI that is in electronic form (computers, copiers, faxes, and PDA

Must only disclose the bare minimum PHI necessary to do a particular job or task. However, for treatment we do not have to limit PHI to the minimum because as much info as possible is needed to treat the patient.

NPP. Notice that HIPAA requires CE's to give their patients. Briefly tells patients about their new HIPAA rights and how to use them

BA. Any person or organization that's not part of a CE's workforce, who works for aCE and is exposed to PHI. Examples would be medical labs and transcriptionists. Special contracts must be signed with CE's that hold them to similar legal standards as CE's under HIPAA

Deals with PHI in all its form, including medical charts and records.