Protecting Personal Financial Information :: Health, CMR, HIPAA

The US financial sector sets guidelines by providing incentives for firms to protect their personal financial information. Some examples of privacy are â€Å". California’s Security Breach Notification Act, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, and Family Education Rights and Privacy Act† (Johnston & Warkentin, 2008). These privacy policies help companies to protect human rights and finance of companies. One of strongest driving factor of health care enhancements are HIPAA regulation of 1996 (Frost & Sullivan, 2008).The health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996 is passed by US congress to protect health information of patients. The aim of HIPAA regulation is protection and assurance of privacy of medical information. The law is set to protect any health related information of patients which is recorded or created by any health care provider (Smith, 2000). Health care faced many challenges to protect health information. The increase in number and cost of private health information, absence of uniform standards for disclosures, patient access, control, and sharing information led HIPAA to pass law in 1996 (Kumar, Henseler, & Haukaas, 2009). HIPAA’s goal was to control patient information disclosure, get more patients access their records, secure data storage, and data transfer (Kumar, Henseler, & Haukaas, 2009). HIPAA also mandates legal activities and penalties for violation of rules .The law has three parts which are privacy information, transaction rule, and security rule. Privacy rule indicates which information needs to be kept private, transactional rule implies data exchange information, and security rule implies security for data transfer (Kumar, Hensele , & Haukaas). HIPAA regulations set rules for vendors to develop a tool or a product which can comply with security rules. With clear security regulations provided by HIPAA, vendors for EHR technology can provide a secure data exchange and compliant record systems. The vendors made all efforts to build a safe and secure data storage product to comply with HIPAA (Miller & Sim, 2004). Health care spend only 2 % of gross revenue in health care improvements where as banking spends around 10% of their gross revenue in their process improvements (Gupta & Murtaza, 2009). With new security rules health care needs to spend their revenue in reforming health care and introducing more techniques to improve patient care. HIPAA mandates several things like necessary information can be shared; providers need to give all patient related info to patients and disclose it on behalf of patients (Gupta & Murtaza, 2009).