The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was published in August 1996 and was approved by Congress. HIPAA is the primary tool that ensures patients that their data will be protected (Tovino, 2017). The act allows providers to act by data protection principles and reduce risks on their part related to the disclosure of confidential information (HHS Office for Civil Rights, 2013). HIPAA is divided into five sections: employee and family protection, administrative simplification, medical cost principles¸, insurance plans, and insurance policies. This structure maximizes efforts to protect health information and avoid the release of health information.
The Concept of Protected Health Information
PHI refers to information that a patient self-reports to a provider or that a provider learns about a patient. Providers collect information about the patient that will be valuable for treatment, care, and diagnosis according to the patient’s condition. The PHI concept allows one to limit the amount of data providers can use. It allows managing levels of access to the information, thereby creating additional protection and keeping it from leaking. PHI must be protected even when organizations transmit data for payment for services, reimbursement, statistics, and public health analysis.
PHI Breach
PHI disclosure or leakage directly affects the patient, depriving them of their ability to protect and keep their data safe. Both physical breaches (defacing documents, stealing or destroying them) and cyberattacks (publishing to networks, leaking to interested parties and malicious parties) lead to the patient no longer trusting providers (Seh et al., 2020). Healthcare providers suffer significant financial losses because they cannot further ensure data security and gradually lose status. Patients have to face the financial and legal difficulties of making fair compensation.
Ethical Considerations
Ethical considerations are an essential responsibility of any healthcare provider. Health care is based on ethical behavior principles that consider each patient’s characteristics and respect their right to identity and opinion in treatment. Workers must consider patients’ opinions to provide meaningful care and create comfort in receiving care. Doctors must be impartial, regardless of the patient’s diagnosis, and not intentionally harm them. Ethical considerations create an environment where the risks of harm to the patient are minimized, and the patient’s needs are maximized. Their absence in the values and goals of providers is wary because patients cannot trust organizations that do not consider their autonomy and capabilities.
Transmitting PHI without Consent
HIPAA regulates and establishes rules for handling medical information about a patient. Exceptions that do not require patient consent include those cases in which data is needed for police or legal proceedings. In addition, public health is the task of public health, so organizations collect and analyze all data. Exceptional cases are those in which the patient cannot give consent due to incapacity and does not have relatives or guardians authorized to act on behalf of the patient. In such a case, providers must make their own decisions and disclosures if a critical need exists.
The case of Byrne v. Avery Center for Obstetrics & Gynecology, P.C.
The Byrne v. Avery Center case documents that disclosing medical data for any reason unrelated to health or national threats is impermissible. Snell (2018) reports that the provider’s conduct, in this case, violates not only HIPAA rules but the person’s right to privacy. The importance of privacy in patient-physician dialogues is paramount, so an organization must have a justifiable reason for disclosing PHI (Tovino, 2017). Disclosure violates universal principles of care, and any organization must consider every aspect of PHI.
References
Garruba, T. (2014). 5 ways health data breaches are far worse than financial ones. Healthcare IT News. Web.
HHS Office for Civil Rights. (2013). Summary of the HIPAA security rule. HHS. Web.
Seh, A. H., Zarour, M., Alenezi, M., Sarkar, A. K., Agrawal, A., Kumar, R., & Khan, R. A. (2020). Healthcare data breaches: insights and implications. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 8(2), 133. Web.
Snell, E. (2018). CT Supreme Court rules patients can sue over PHI disclosure. Health IT Security News. Web.
Tovino, S. A. (2017). Teaching the HIPAA privacy rule. Saint Louis University Law Journal, 61, 470-480. Web.