Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA)

 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA)

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) Rules regulate the use and disclosure of personal health information (PHI). The national standards were created to protect our PHI from data theft. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), adopted in 2009, was established to improve health care quality, safety, and efficiency through the promotion of health IT and promote interoperability (CMS, 2021;OCR, 2021).

· Data sets help with healthcare analytics to evaluate collected data in a meaningful way. The University of Washington (2022) explains that clinical data collected can include “administrative and demographic information, diagnosis, treatment, prescription drugs, laboratory tests, physiologic monitoring data, hospitalization, patient insurance” (para. 4).

· This information placed in the correct algorithm can look for trends that can guide nurse schedules and the correlation to medication errors and patient safety and outcomes, which relates to the Excel spreadsheet I created (see Appendix). In addition, this information could be used to negotiate nurse contracts between the union and the hospital in the future

References Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (2021, December 1). Privacy and Security Information | CMS. CMS. Retrieved May 1, 2022, from  https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Administrative-Simplification/HIPAA-ACA/PrivacyandSecurityInformation

Office for Civil Rights (OCR). (2021, June 28). HITECH Act Enforcement Interim Final Rule. HHS.Gov.  https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/hitech-act-enforcement-interim-final-rule/index.html#:%7E:text=The%20Health%20Information%20Technology%20for,use%20of%20health%20information%20technology .