Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act - Essay Example

The main attempt of HIPAA has been to adopt standards to help improve the effectiveness and the working of the national healthcare systems in the use of electronic data (Beaver & Herold, 2003).

            In simple terms, the main aim of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 is to guide the development and maintenance of patient information management. As mentioned earlier, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2010) explains, that “Title II of HIPPA required the Department of Health and Human Services to establish national standards for electronic health transactions and national identifiers for providers, health plans and employers” (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 2010).

            In an excellent article named, Integrating privacy and security: coordination benefits HIPAA compliance efforts, the author Alder explains, even after a number of years have passed for the deadline compliance with HIPPA, ‘By summer 2006, only 39 percent of respondents to an AHIMA survey reported that their facilities were in full compliance with the HIPAA privacy regulations’ (Adler, 2008). The author also highlights that ‘There are a number of reasons why compliance has been difficult to achieve and maintain, but the most cited reason is a lack of resources’ (Adler, 2008).

            The rules for HIPPA have been very long and intricate and the writing and implementation of the rules have taken a very long time. The process of the development of the transactions and the code sets, rules, and also the national employer identity took the government a high amount of time to complete. The process has been very time-consuming making the process look like it took several years to write and for the implementation of the riles because of the high level of scrutiny and intricacies that were involved. The HIPPA intended to include the healthcare environment and also with the high levels of technological developments the process was long drawn and took several years the implementation.

                        The impact of HIPPA was quite vast on various entities like patients, providers, and third parties. The most benefited of all were the patients who received their rights and were also now aware of what their rights were. The others also benefited to some extent and the main improvement that has been noted is the compliance and the level of standards that are required to be maintained by the parties. Also with the continuous growth of technology and the need for higher security, the introduction of HIPPA has been a blessing in disguise in a number of ways.