Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act of 1996 is a significant health care law, which Medicare providers need to follow. This federal law is designed to allow the portability of protected health data for billing purpose. This ensures proper billing across the country.
HIPAA created certain measures and procedures that all the physicians and covered entities have to follow. Physicians should follow HIPAA Compliance risk analysis as these laws are formed to aid the physicians.
We have compiled crucial points to prove that conducting HIPAA compliance risk is helpful:
Technology should toe to HIPAA line
Well, this doesn’t circumscribe to your electronic record system i.e, to your EMR or EHR that has PHI and HIPAA on lock. There are several high tech electronic devices and software programs as part of clinical practice, right from wearables to telehealth platforms. They are suppose to be HIPAA- compliant. Medical coding and billing companies have started leveraging new technologies, which are developed keeping HIPAA standards in mind.
Make sure to have NPI
HIPAA requires entity that condenses healthcare service to possess unique 10 digit known as NPI- National Provider Identifier. There are two types of NPIs:
- NPIs for organizations
- NPIs for individual practitioners
Secure your PHI by using non technical and technical safeguards
Data storage and transmission is at high risk in every industry, which in a way means consumer identities are vulnerable to hackers. The hacking chances increase in the healthcare industry, which makes PHI storage and transmission regulation crucial.
This can be eliminated by discovering the risk of unlawful access to electronic PHI in the organization. Access all the security measures such as technical, administrative and physician safeguards. Be ready to address the loopholes in the organization’s security program.
HIPAA compliance Risk analysis will result in:
- Greater security and privacy of patients
- Cost reduction in the PHI and health plan through standardization
- Health plan will have constant processing as electronic formats and values will be uniform throughout the health industry
- Data interpretation through set codes and standardized transactions
- Easy accessibility of new option for submitting referrals and authorization for transmission of different referrals using uniform formats.
The perfect way to ensure that office is HIPAA complaint is make patient privacy an integral part of your practice.Practice the above discussed way to breeze your internal audit and even if OCR shows up, you don’t have to take the stress.
