HIPAA

Effectiveness

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has effectively provided data protection for employees. The policy mandates employers to employ utile various recommended safeguards to protect the sensitive data of their employees. Initially, organizations were not required to safeguard the personal information of their employees. This meant that nobody could sue employers if they failed to do so. Thus, the HIPAA policy proposed to be adopted to ensure control over who can access medical data and who could share the health information. Such guidelines have effectively enabled the policy to enhance the protection of medical information, especially among employees.

Meeting the needs

The protection of private information is very critical, especially in today’s technologically sound society. Initially, a person’s medical information was utilized as a “loophole” to obtain personalized information such as social security number, birth date, residential and occupational addresses. This was possible since most of the medical institutions were not required not to discourse such information. However, the introduction of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and subsequent amendments have been instrumental in enabling individuals, as either employees or patients minimize loss and sharing of personalized information without their consent. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) enhance protection to the individual, offering protection of medical payment history, past, present, and future medication conditions, and other personalized information. Thus, The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) meets the population’s needs by introducing hefty fines and penalties to individuals or organizations that facilitate directly or indirectly personalized medical information. A study conducted by She et al. (2020) indicates that HIPAA has effectively reduced the loss of medical data over the years.

Reference

Seh, A. H., Zarour, M., Alenezi, M., Sarkar, A. K., Agrawal, A., Kumar, R., & Ahmad Khan, R. (2020, June). Healthcare data breaches: Insights and implications. In Healthcare (Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 133). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.