Need help with questions on HIPAA?

Question

Ok I had to read this scenerio and answer questions afterwards. I have answered them all but I'm a little confused on the wording of this other one. I was wondering if anyone could help me out with this? Here is a brief description of the scenerio (since it's too long to write here). This guy got injured on the job and sent to the hospital, his boss was worried and asked what happend. The supervising nurse was away and the other nurse was new. Since the lady seemed worried she pulled the file of the man to show the boss so she wouldn't be worried about her getting fired from her job because the accident. When the man got out of the hospital and back to work his boss started asking about his anti-depressants. He learned she had read his chart and the hospital got fined $10,000 plus had to learn to notifying patients of privacy practices, training staff on proper procedure, appointing a privacy officer, and establishing safeguards against distributing patient information to unauthorized parties.

Now the question is:What areas of the organization did HIPAA compliance impact?

This is what I am wanting to say (please let me know if I'm off target or need to say more).

The HIPAA compliance act impacted every area in the hospital. Since the hospital is filled with patients and charts every person working in it needed to know the rules and guidelines when it came to the patients. Making sure that they (hospital) does not get fined again and that their patients information is confidential is one of the top priorities.

Any suggestions? Or did I get completely off base? Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Well, it mainly affected records.  Not so much the medical procedures in the hospital, or sanitation, or nutrition, or rehab.

It affects training of new staff (the nurse should have been trained on releasing records properly), educating patients on their rights (they should've gotten one of those pamphlet thingies to sign about their rights under HIPAA), and following proper procedures (privacy should be protected because people's civil rights are at stake.)

The nurse helped the employer discriminate against the employee by providing information on the patient's medical condition.  The employer should not be able to use that information to make decisions on the employee's future or to intimidate the employee.

The fine isn't the biggest problem (though I'm sure they didn't like paying for it.)  The main thing is, can you keep patient information safe so that it can't be used against them?  The law says that patient information is to be kept private and only released with the express permission of the patient.

That didn't happen.  As far as the privacy officer, I guess that's what you get when you can't do HIPAA stuff properly with the staff you already have.

Just another cost of doing business improperly.