Professional Transcribing, Typesetting, Digital Design and more!

In 1996, the United States Federal Government enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The purpose of this act was to increase and further insure the use of technology and the use of digital data transactions to improve the privacy of personal medical information by those handling this data. In addition to insuring privacy of personal data, it was to also help increase the efficiency of the U.S. health care system.

There are two Title’s in this act. Title I addressed the group health insurance liabilities. Something that is not necessarily pertinent to this particular entry,but good information to know should you ever need it.

Title II addresses the concern of preventing health care fraud and abuse and what the liabilities to administration are.    We will be addressing this element for those that might need the use of a Medical Transcriptionist.

The HIPPA established many elements of security safeguards that need to be adhered to by anyone handling medical transcription or records.   These are in three categories:

• Technical – This covers the element of data transmission and how it is handled by secure transmission and what procedures to implement in case   of security.     It is provided to the government for approval prior to providing the services.

• Physical – This element covers the physical hardware, accessibility to said hardware and workstation requirements for use and privacy.

• Administrative – Policies and standard operating procedures that will be provided to how they will comply with the act. These include elements of who deals with the records, organization of records, storage of records to disaster recovery of data.

Each of these elements is written down in more detail and can be found under Title II in the HIPAA. ALL Medical Transcriptionist services should be HIPAA approved and compliant.   Make sure that if you are dealing with sensitive information that security elements are put into place to keep your documents and information secure, even if you are not asking for Medical Transcription to be done. Security is also a vital part of our service to you, our client.   Ask us about our procedures and our privacy policy we will do our best to certify that your documents are handled with the utmost care.

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