HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT

A new law, known as “HIPAA” (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), requires that we establish new policies and procedures to ensure patient confidentiality and the security of patient information.  Preparing for HIPAA will benefit both you as individual employees as well as the institution's compliance with federal regulations.  There are nine parts to HIPAA.  Our immediate compliance will focus on the Privacy and Security Rules.  

The HIPAA Privacy Rule regulates the use and disbursement of individually identifiable health information and gives individuals the right to determine and restrict access to their health information.  Compliance with HIPAA’s privacy regulations became required on April 14, 2003.  There are substantial penalties, both civil and criminal, for non-compliance. 

The HIPAA Security Rule requires that reasonable and appropriate technical, physical, and administrative safeguards be taken with electronic individually identifiable health information.  Specifically, we must ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all electronic protected health information we create, receive, maintain or transmit. Compliance with the Security Rule became required on April 21, 2005.

A helpful summary of this Act can be found at http://aspe.hhs.gov/admnsimp and at http://www.cms.gov/hipaa by clicking on the “HIPAA Administrative Simplification” link.  The texts of the Privacy and Security Rules may be found at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/.

HIPAA will impact the Anschutz Medical Campus in various ways.  Patient records (including shadow records), human subjects research records, and marketing demographics that contain health information are a few examples of the ways in which we will fall under HIPAA’s regulation.  Responsibility for HIPAA compliance is being coordinated by the Office of Regulatory Compliance under the direction of Assistant Vice Chancellor of Regulatory Compliance, Angela R. Charboneau Wishon.

For additional information or assistance, please contact the HIPAA Compliance Office at 303-724-4722 or at HIPAA@UCHSC.edu.