Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, in Section F, Administrative Simplification, laid out a series of requirements for medical practices designed to increase efficiency, and at the same time, enhance security of patients’ private health information. This Act laid out a series of actions required, over a phase-in period, for almost all medical practices. Among those requirements is training for all staff in medical offices. The JCAAI believes that review of this online program, plus review of an online HHS summary of the privacy rule – http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/ as well as guidance documents referenced in the HHS document, should go a long way in meeting the training requirements of the HIPAA regulations respecting medical privacy. Finally, we believe that in complying with the requirement to train your staff, you will need to review the internal policies and procedures, which we have provided, with your staff.

The HIPAA regulations mandate components of a variety of activities, which we have incorporated into a series of forms, which should make your compliance with HIPAA regulations substantially easier. We have placed these forms in a separate folder (HIPAA Forms).  We will refer to these throughout the program. We suggest you download and print them so you have them as a reference as you continue through this program. We have also provided you with modelHIPAA privacypolicies and procedures. You are required to have HIPAA policies and procedures adopted by your office. You can use any model you want, but we have provided you with model policies, which when you fill in the blanks, should help to insure that your office is in compliance with HIPAA regulations. We will attempt, as much as possible, to give you choices for the blanks, but since some of the blanks will require decisions unique to each practice, we will not be able to give you choices for each blank. We recommend you review these policies as part of this program, since some policies will not be discussed in this overview, because they are self-explanatory. We especially call your attention to policies 1-4.

Both the policies and the forms need to be filed in a single location for easy access. We recommend you create a HIPAA binder in which to store all of these documents.

This program will discuss each of these Standards in turn, but will focus primarily on the Privacy Standards. You should note that final regulations for security and for the national provider identifier have been issued, but that the required compliance dates for implementation of these regulations are still in the future. This program will be modified at a future time to reflect more detailed guidance on implementing those additional standards.

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