As the health industry continues to modernize and digitally transform — driving growth among healthcare providers and diversifying its supply chain and partners — complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act becomes fundamental for the sector to safeguard health operations, PHI, individual rights and mitigate and respond to breaches and incidents.

This policy, written by Ray Fernandez for TechRepublic Premium, provides guidelines for healthcare providers, organizations working in and with the health industry and any other business affected by the HIPAA Act in the United States.

Featured text from the policy:

Acceptable uses of the company’s HIPAA-affected systems include:

The generation, use and sharing of information (whether electronic, written or oral) by physicians, medical professionals, hospitals and other clinical institutions to provide good care to individuals, evaluate the quality of care they are providing and ensure they receive proper payment from health plans, as listed in Permitted Uses and Disclosures: Exchange for Treatment and Exchange for Health Care Operations.

Processing PHI for legitimate business purposes: Employees may use HIPAA-affected systems to access, use or disclose PHI for authorized business purposes, such as providing treatment, billing for services or conducting quality improvement activities.

Communicating with patients: Employees may use HIPAA-affected systems to communicate with patients about their healthcare, such as sending appointment reminders or discussing test results.

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TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 20 hours of dedicated writing, editing and research.