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Improve your HIPAA procedures and policies

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, October 4, 2007

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The HIPAA privacy and security rules have been enforceable for several years now, but many healthcare facilities still need to work on their policies and procedures. Whether your facility needs to fill in some gaps where policies and procedures don't fully comply with the regulation, or you simply need to do some work to update according to today's new technologies and standards, chances are your policies and procedures could use some tweaking.

The good news is, if you strive for continuous improvement in your facility's policies and procedures, compliance with HIPAA is likely to follow.

• Start-but don't finish-with a risk assessment. Some organizations think that they are compliant if they have performed a security assessment, resolved a few of the recognized issues, and are working on some of the others. But simply installing a new firewall or handing out better passwords to your staff members doesn't mean you are in compliance with HIPAA.
• Think outside the HIPAA box. For many healthcare providers, HIPAA provided the impetus to create information and security policies. However, in most cases, the policies and procedures you create for HIPAA compliance are reasonable to adapt for use in protecting the rest of your organization's confidential information.
• Plan ahead for feasible enforcement. In order for a set of policies and procedures to be strong, you must be able to enforce it. Therefore, when you create policies and procedures, consider how you will monitor and enforce them.

To get more information, go to Briefings on HIPAA (BOH). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire October issue of BOH. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of BOH have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their October issue.

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