KatrinaHealth/HIPPA and Data Protection/ Case Study - Research Paper Example

Katrina Health/HIPPA and Data Protection Case Study When Hurricane Katrina struck, there was a lot of destruction and lossof lives. The government of the day made a number of attempts to lighten the burden of the people as will be seen below. This article will articulate on some of the steps that the government did take in light of the disaster. Aside from that, this article will attempt to visualize these steps being made national. It will look at the challenges of this as well as solutions that may work out well for these challenges.

IntroductionHealth Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is divided into two titles that is, title I and title II (Lahti & Peterson, 2007). Title I covers health Insurance protection for workers and their families when they loose or change employment. Title II covers standards that will regulate electronic health care provision (Lahti & Peterson, 2007). The rules are meant to protect the patients from any form of victimization that they may face as a result of change of employment status.

According to Lahti and Peterson (2007), the second title is also involved in matters of security and privacy of health data which firms need to focus their attention on.Katrina Health Program, on the other hand, came up as a result of the hurricane that swept over New Orleans causing flooding and displacement of people from their homes. In this regard, several changes were made to allow the containment of the problem that came up. The recommendations made were temporary financial relief on Medicaid costs for residents who resided in selected parishes of Louisiana prior to Hurricane Katrina.

It also covered counties in Alabama and Mississippi, as well as, a condition to not let Alaska’s federal medical assistance to fall below its FY2005 level. The other recommendation was boost in the unequal share of hospital payment to the District of Columbia and the third proposal was a number of demonstrations and program expansions (Ewing, 2008).Turning Katrina Health Program from an Individual Level into a More Effective National Level ProgramThe Katrina Health program as seen above was aimed at specific regions that happened to be hard hit by Hurricane Katrina.

The residents of these areas were hard hit and they ought to have been offered with a chance to recover, and, therefore the above recommendations were made. However, for the program to become a national level one, there are three matters that require urgent measures. The first issue is legislation. The assumption here is that the legislature will come in to make laws that will have the cumulative effect of standardizing healthcare along the Katrina Health program. The challenges to this move can be evidenced in the attempt by passing the ‘Obamacare’ plan.

According to Kronenfeld (1997), the legislative process is a largely complex one where the passing or failing of legislature depends largely on the individuals passing them. The Katrina Health program will therefore face the challenge of a split legislature. This split legislature can therefore manage or fail to pass the legislature thus its failure or success. This can be overcome through intense lobbying on the part of the mover of the legislation to ensure that there is the required number to successfully pass the law in either or both houses of the legislature.

Another issue is that of funding. At the moment the government has a lot of economic problems owing to the impact of the economic melt down that the country went through. According to Shi and Singh (2008) the major challenge that public health institutions face is that of ensuring that they are efficient while at the same time providing healthcare to those who cannot afford it. This is something that attempting to nationalize the Katrina Healthcare would face. A suggested solution would be to introduce taxation that is progressive in nature.

This means that the country should tax wealthier states and individuals more to allow it to provide proper health care to all its citizens.The third issue is that of having proper information filtering to the people about this plan. The idea here is to make sure that the accurate information reaches the people. It is important to note that it must be convincing enough to allow them to accept it and not easily be swayed by rumors. Infusing culture in the messages to be disseminated will allow people to have a higher acceptability of the whole message (Samovar, Porter, McDaniel & Roy, 2010).

This therefore goes to show that the information that will be disseminated will be infused in the cultures of the recipients through target audience segmentation. This will therefore allow those disseminating the information to effectively put across their message.References:Ewing, M. T. (2008). State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.Kronenfeld, J. J. (1997). The Changing Federal Role in U.S. Health Care Policy. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.Lahti, C. B.

and Peterson, R. (2007). Sarbanes-Oxley IT Compliance Using Open Source Tools. Massachusetts: Syngress Publishing, Inc. and Elsevier, Inc.Samovar, L. A. Porter, R. E. McDaniel, E. R and Roy, C. S. (2010). Communication Between Cultures. Massachusetts: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.Shi, L. and Singh, D. A. (2008). Delivering Health Care in America. London: Jones and Bartlett Publishers International.