By Lora Jones
When HIPAA was enacted in 2002 it meant a major change for the medical industry and how things were done. There were a lot of stipulations with the act and it was not easy for organizations to comply at first. With the help of HIPAA consulting services however things got better and pretty soon all offices were integrated into the system.

HIPAA stand for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is a great thing for patients because it dictates who can look at your records and when. Who is allowed to get or request your records and also the way communications are handled between doctors and doctors offices. Communication was going to be an issue because doctors were use to just sending over charts and records based on another doctors request. Now it will require the patient to become involved.

Doctors might be great with patients and their need for help, but when it comes to paperwork and documents and things of that nature you can forget it, they get lost very quickly. It is mainly because their entire career they have nurses and receptionists and aids taking care of every little bit of that paperwork.

It is important for patients to be given their rights and information because when the act was first introduced it was a bit confusing to professionals and doctors and the average patient would need some help to understand what exactly was involved in the act. This was very important because it effected the patients the most.

Patient rights is a very important factor in where government funding goes and where the community decides to go for their medical needs. When these HIPAA laws became effective the places that were prepared were able to hit the ground running and get their staff under control and trained on how to properly administer the new paperwork.

It was not just the doctors and the staff that needed to know what this all meant but the patients too. In addition to signing this and that and being given this and that, patients were now being given HIPAA paperwork explaining what it was and what their rights were. They also had to sign something saying they received that in particular.

Many of the policies that did not deal directly with the patient records and how they can be accessed were regarding the best practices or the proper ways for thing to take place. Like the aforementioned patient paging and medical charts. Other systems include sign in sheets for handing out HIPAA forms, keeping other documents confidential, and a system to alert staff to changes made in a record.

HIPAA consulting has helped the medical industry adapt to the ever changing world that we live in. With the addition of HIPAA laws the records and record keeping policies became a safe haven for patient privacy like it should have been all along. These changes were difficult to adapt to and if not for the consulting agencies it would have been a very long road indeed.




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