HIPAA: Protecting Personal Health Information In 1996, Congress
passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act,
better known as HIPAA. This far-reaching act created national
standards for the protection of personal health information,
through what is known as the Privacy Rule. Virtually every
entity that is involved with health care is affected by HIPAA.
There are severe civil penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA
regulations or for knowingly violating patient privacy. The
underlying purpose of the Privacy Rule is to ensure the
confidentiality of patients’ medical information. A key to this
is to remove all patient identifiable information from the
outside of the chart. This includes not only the patient’s name
and address, but any other information that could be used to
determine their identity, including social security numbers,
birth dates or phone numbers. Color-coded numeric indexing is a
good solution. Charts are identified by a patient number only.
Information that reveals a health co