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Essay On HIPAA

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Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act also known as HIPAA became active in 1996. This is to allow all patients to have the right to their own privacy and having their medical records respected. This is a federal protection law of health information. This includes health care providers such as clinics, hospitals, nursing homes, and doctor offices must abide by this law. It is not limited to just the medical field but also other organizations, such as retail stores, small businesses, as well as dental offices and much more. This law is used to protect the patient. In order for the law to work efficiently HIPAA is also associated with health plans such as insurance companies, company health plans, Medicare, and Medicaid along with clearing houses are unable to reveal patient information.
The reason HIPAA was created is to improve the access to health insurance and also to …show more content…

These consequences include criminal penalties that have fines of up to fifty thousand dollars. Along with one year in prison or possibly more. Civil penalties are an additional one hundred dollars per violation up to twenty five thousand dollars per year. This does sound very extreme but you must think about the consequences for the patient that has had their privacy exposed. Here is a scenario what if you had a teacher at your local high school diagnosed with cancer and she had not yet been consulted by her Doctor and the word got out and she found out though her daughter that had heard from someone else. That’s not fair. A second scenario consists of a girl who has chlamydia, she has gone to the doctor to get it taken care of and one of the nurses is an acquaintance with her and she goes home to tell her husband who is best friends with her boyfriend which they are sexually active, although she didn’t get the chlamydia from him. This is a prime example of one of the reasons this became a

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