HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Its original purpose was to protect people from losing their health insurance if they change jobs or have preexisting health conditions. HIPAA has been expanded over the years to also help reduce the cost and administrative burdens of healthcare transactions, and most recently to develop standards and requirements to protect the privacy and security of personal health information.

It's HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules that we’ll cover here.

HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules require healthcare organizations to adopt processes and procedures to ensure the highest degree of patient confidentiality. It makes sense. Patient’s desire their information to be secure and rely on you to keep it safe and confidential.

Protected Health Information or “PHI” can be created, stored or transmitted in many formats. Through verbal conversations, written documents, over computer software or hardware and in various other forms. All require security and confidentiality measures to be implemented.

PHI may include anything in the patient health records such as lab results, medical history, images and more. It also includes other patient information like names, birthdates, social security numbers, email addresses and other information that can be used to create identity theft.

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