Case study on HIPAA State/Federal Regulations

Unit outcomes addressed in this Assignment:

Define Key Terms
Apply policies and procedures for access and disclosure of protected health information (PHI)
Describe ownership of the physical record and the information in it
Differentiate between consents that are sufficient to release PHI and those which are not
Release protected health information to authorized user
Course outcome assessed/addressed in this Assignment:

HI135-3: Summarize the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and state/federal regulations which govern the release of protected health information.

Instructions

Write a two page paper responding to one of the two cases below. Respond thoroughly to the question posed at the end of the case study. Cite your sources and use appropriate APA guidelines. Support your responses with information from the reading in Chapter 10 as well as HIPAA guidelines.
You are the director of health information services at a tertiary-care hospital. You and the director of emergency room services are jointly responsible for reporting instances of communicable disease, child abuse, and cancer to the appropriate state authority. You have just completed an audit of your institution’s reporting mechanism and discovered that the reporting requirements are not consistently met. The audit could not definitively establish whether the reporting never occurred or occurred but was not documented in the patient’s health record. Discuss what legal issues are present and what approaches you should take to resolve this problem.
You are the head of the health information management department at General Hospital. An FBI agent has arrived at your office with a search warrant in hand. He asks to speak with you about the hospital’s health record. How should you respond?

ORDER CUSTOM, PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.