The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

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To begin our analysis or your company, Team Blazers believes that understanding the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is the best place to start. We realize that working in the Health Care Industry that your organization, management team, and employees are aware of HIPAA, however, we would rather not take that for granted. Team Blazers, wants to ensure that everyone in your organization fully understands what exactly HIPAA want to ensure that your organizations management team and employees are fully aware of who, what, where, when and why, understanding and implications of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. We don’t want to skim over this policy and take for granted that the employees know what management knows about HIPAA; we want to make sure everyone within your organization knows the exact same, therefore, diminishing the possibility of your organization causing a HIPAA violation.
In today’s information technology driving society, identity management, especially in the healthcare industry, has become more complex to maintain. In 1996, the introduction of The Kassebaum-Kennedy Bill, also known as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was enacted (Atchins & Fox, 1997). The main objective of HIPAA is aimed at strengthening patient rights, increasing effectiveness and efficiency, and decrease administrative costs by preventing fraud, waste and abuse. HIPAA has two main areas of concern, which are divided into two parts or sections; Title I and Title II. Title I is the first part of the Act ‘Portability” is self-explanatory as it deals with the portability of health insurance. Title I is already in place and being implemented by hea...

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... those personnel that need to access PHI in order to do their job.
The best approach to manage PHI access is to use Role-Based Access Controls RBAC). Traditional Access Control give is given user-by-user basis with network administrators given the permissions. This model is time intensive, not secure, and puts limitations on the information owner. Role-Based Access Controls is based off of the need-to-know concept by giving access to areas that are pre-define and approved based on a person’s roles. The responsibility of giving access to information is controlled by the owner of the information improving efficiency and stability of information management process.

Works Cited

Atchins, B. K., & Fox, D. M. (1997). The Politics Of The Health. Health Affairs, Volume 16, Number 3, 146.

HIPAA BACKGROUND, The University of Chicago HIPAA Program Office
October 23, 2006

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