The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) profoundly changed health care privacy requirements and patient privacy rights. A nearly four-year period of regulatory rulemaking culminated in the HIPAA transaction and code set regulations that mandate uniform formats and coding for electronic health care transactions, such as insurance eligibility determinations and claims presentments and payments. In the move to standardize electronic transactions, the privacy and security regulations were also federally mandated to regulate the privacy of patient health data and to require certain entities to implement physical, administrative and technical privacy and security policies and procedures in order to deter unauthorized access, use or disclosure of oral, written and electronic protected health information (PHI). With the enactment of the HITECH Act came an expansion of the HIPAA Privacy and Security requirements and an increase in the potential civil and criminal penalties that may be assessed. The Breach Notification Final Rules soon followed requiring certain entities to notify patients, the government and even the media of certain breaches of unsecured PHI.
Baker Donelson's Health Law attorneys have carefully tracked and mastered HIPAA's intricacies to provide authoritative counsel to health care clients as they undertake the demanding compliance burdens of the Act and its rules. The four main categories of these services are: