How is conducting HIPAA Compliance Risk Analysis Helpful for Physicians in 2017?

HIPAA – Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act of 1996, is a remarkably significant healthcare law that Medical Care providers need to be aware of.  HIPAA is a federal law specifically designed to let portability of protected health information for billing purposes, so that health care industry has a proper billing across the country.

In connection with enabling billing data portability, HIPAA also created certain privacy procedures and measures that all covered entities and now physicians are supposed to follow.

The law is intended to help physicians hence; it is important that they follow HIPAA Compliance risk analysis. Failure to comply with this wide-reaching piece of healthcare policy could put your organization’s future in serious jeopardy — to the tune of crippling financial penalties or can get deeper like criminal charges.

Thus, it’s important that you and your staff are not only regulating to all HIPAA requirements, but ensuring full compliance within your organization.

Here’s how HIPAA Compliance Risk Analysis Can Be Helpful to The Physicians In 2017. All you have to do is:

• Ensure that your technology toes HIPAA Line

This goes beyond certifying your electronic records system i.e. your practice’s EMR or EHR has HIPAA and PHI on lock.

These days, medical billing provider uses different types of software programs and several high-tech electronic devices as part of their clinical practice from wearable’s to tele-health platforms and they are supposed to be complete HIPAA-compliant.

The technology developed specifically for healthcare purpose was built keeping HIPAA standards in mind.

• Have NPI for your organization and each HIPAA covered provider on your staff.

HIPAA requires any entity that condenses healthcare services to have a unique 10 digit which we know as NPI- National Provider Identifier.

Basically there are 2 types of NPIs:

• NPIs are for individual practitioners
• NPIs are for organizations

This is important when physicians with similar names are practicing in the same city and under same NPI 2 type.

• Secure your PHI by practicing proper technical and non-technical safeguards

In this ever evolving electronic age, data storage and transmission is at great risk in nearly every industry and that means consumer identities are more vulnerable to hackers. In fact there are more chances to happen in health care industry, and that is the reason electronic PHI storage and transmission should be greatly regulated.

You can eliminate the by identifying the risks to unlawful access to electronic PHI in their organization. Assess the security measures including administrative, technical, and physical safeguards that currently exist in the organization. Address any gaps in the organization’s security program.

Conducting HIPAA Compliance Risk Analysis Will Result In:

• Greater privacy and security of patients
• Personal health information provider and health plan overhead cost reductions through standardization
• Constant processes among health plans as electronic formats and values will be uniform throughout the health care industry
• Interpretation of data submission through standardized transactions and code sets
• Accessibility of a new option for submitting authorizations and referrals that let transmission of multiple referrals and authorizations in uniform formats

Bottom Line

The best way to ensure that your office is always HIPAA compliant is to make patient privacy a part of your business practice, and embed into the workflow. Practice this, and your internal audit will be a breeze, and if OCR does shows up, you don’t have to take the stress.