Why Training Employees in HIPAA Is Important

Posted by johnm0307 on October 29th, 2014

Whether it is the medical insurance agency or the medical services industry, handling the client documents is very tough aspect to deal with. If a person is not handling them in the prescribed manner, he or she may end up by either misplacing the documents, sharing them with third party or end up altering them without the permission of the client. Even though all the documents related to medical history are subjected to the authority, they cannot or need not be shared with anyone else without the permission of the client, employee or the patient.

HIPAA was created to avoid all kinds of insurance frauds, which had been on the rise before this particular act was introduced. Several people who are not ill tried to forge ailments in order to acquire money for their so called treatment from the insurance companies. Apart from this, a couple of him or her also went to the extent of paying for treatment of another person not on dependant condition with their insurance. Apart from this, some of the companies also shared information about the employees and patients with insurance companies without informing the person concerned.

Henceforth, to avoid all such mishaps, the companies and hospitals these days need to train their employees in HIPAA security policies. Some other essential points to be considered for the HIPAA training are:

-        Work with confidential documents properly!

Instead of mishandling the documents, they must handle them properly as confidential documents need to be done. Even though it is not mentioned that it is confidential, your workers need to keep it like that. It is a personal medical history of a person, which should never be shared to a third person.

-        Limited access!

You need to limit the access to the documents to reduce its illegal use or misuse. Some of the hospitals only allow the authorized person to look into and handle the documents. All the institutions everywhere should follow this. HIPAA security policies have given right to people to protect their medical records.

-        Contact person before using!

Before using any of the information belonging to any person, try to contact him or her and seek permission. You have no right to work with documents or handing them over to the third party without seeking permission of the concerned person.

With proper HIPAA training, you can avoid several expensive law suits filed every year by the affected people. Moreover, it also helps your employees to learn the art of maintaining secrecy.

Visit http://www.hipaatraining.net/ for HIPAA risk Analysis.