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Confidentiality in Health CareHealth Care Professionals Must Learn the Rules of Confidentiality
Can you keep a secret? If you're really bad at it, you're going to have to learn if you want a career in health care.
Confidentiality is a big issue for everyone, not just the celebrity patient. It's the law now; not just an issue of ethics. HIPAACongress built in privacy and confidentiality stipulations when it passed the HIPAA legislation. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that was signed into law in 1996. Originally the primary intent of this law was to protect individuals from losing their health insurance if they changed jobs and to make pre-existing condition clauses obsolete as long as insurance coverage doesn't lapse. Along the way to passing as legislation does, HIPAA also picked up other issues such as giving the federal government the power to intervene in issues of fraud and abuse of Medicare and other health insurance. This was a very important add-on in light of the corruption in the home health industry with Medicare. In order to enforce some of these issues, HIPAA also had to address confidentiality and privacy issues. Doctor-patient privilege has long been an ethical provision to ensure that patients provide doctors with truthful accounts of their signs and symptoms so that the physician can accurately diagnose and treat the patient. HIPAA added on many more restrictions. Reporting of Communicable DiseasesPublic health has laws governing reportable illnesses such as TB, small pox, and sexually transmitted diseases. In these cases, the patient's identity is exposed in order to protect the general public. Otherwise, patient's identities and health status are confidential. Now that level of confidentiality has been raised with HIPAA. Health consumers have noted HIPAA regulations at work in such places as pharmacies where they are asked to line up a few feet away from the counter to wait to turn in or pick up prescriptions, allowing the person at the counter some measure of privacy to discuss medications and health status. On the "inside" health care professionals have many other practices to observe. These include when and where they can discuss patients, who can access medical records. A Need to KnowJust because you work in a hospital and can access a medical record does not mean you have the right to do so. There is a "need to know" clause. If you don't have a specific need to access that information, you have no right to do so. HIPAA laws began to take effect in 2001 and became mandatory in 2003. In some instances procedures, infractions and fines are still being worked out. Specifics vary from one facility to another as to how health care professionals are expected to conduct business. Be sure you understand the HIPAA rules and procedures for each facility you work in or train in as a student. Shhhhhh....As a health care professional you will need to learn to protect patient's identity and health status. You can't even discuss with your spouse how you met and cared for the latest Hollywood heart throb in the hospital today.
The copyright of the article Confidentiality in Health Care in Health Field is owned by Kathy Quan . Permission to republish Confidentiality in Health Care in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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