HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) 1996 and its regulations
ensure the privacy of an individual’s health information as well as control
the way the protected health information (PHI) is collected, maintained, utilized,
and disclosed by health care providers and insurance organizations. Security and
accountability of healthcare data being the key to HIPAA guidelines, it mandates
adoption of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national
identifiers for providers, health plans, and employers. The implementation of HIPAA
standards has led to an enhanced use of electronic data interchange.
Apart from checking the waste, fraud, and abuse in healthcare delivery and insurance
HIPAA aims to deescalate administrative costs, it also endeavors to augment the
efficiency of health care system as well as the comprehensiveness and portability
of health insurance plans. Health plans are obliged to certify their HIPAA compliance
and can face serious penalties for lack of certification or non-compliance with
the latest rules and regulations.
MBC HIPAA Compliance
As a reputable medical billing company, MBC follows the patient information privacy
and security rules very stringently. All members of our billing and coding consortium,
transcription teams, as well as our workforce and business affiliates comply with
HIPAA regulations and the MBC HIPAA policies.
We, at MBC ensure that our work procedures vis-à-vis all clients comply with
or even exceed HIPAA guidelines and regulations and have made necessary arrangements
to protect Patient Health Information (PHI). Any member of our team who deals closely
with patient health information is provided training about the privacy and security
procedures to be adopted to handle the patient health data. Moreover, this information
is disclosed to no one except our clients who are authorized to receive this information
and employees who are working on the client's account.
We are liable to ensure complete HIPAA compliance for our clients if the operations
are handled by us. However, in case the client chooses to go with a local agency
connected through us, the HIPAA compliance responsibility is shouldered by the local
agency. We shall provide the HIPAA guidelines, but in case of a breach the local
agency must be held responsible.