Privacy Of Protected Health Information Research Articles

Review of HIPAA, Part 1: History, Protected Health Information, and Privacy and Security Rules.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 has made an impact on the operation of health-care organizations. HIPAA includes 5 titles, and its regulations are complex. Many are familiar with the HIPAA aspects that address protection of the privacy and security of patients' medical records. There are new rules to HIPAA that address the implementation of electronic medical records. HIPAA provides rules for protected health information (PHI) and what should be protected and secured. The privacy rule regulates the use and disclosure of PHI and sets standards that an entity working with health data must follow to protect patients' private medical information. The HIPAA security rule complements the privacy rule and requires entities to implement physical, technical, and administrative safeguards to protect the privacy of PHI. This article-part 1 of a 2-part series-is a refresher on HIPAA, its history, its rules, its implications, and the role that imaging professionals play.

A comparative evaluation of patient satisfaction outcomes in an interprofessional student-run free clinic

As the evidence supporting the value of well-coordinated healthcare teams continues to grow, so to do the calls from medical educators and policy makers for the development of meaningful interprofessional educational experiences for health professions students. The student-run clinic has emerged as a unique venue for such experiential interprofessional learning experiences, with over 100 such clinics now in operation across North America. As the number and variety of these clinics rises, it has become increasingly important to understand the quality of care which they deliver. Here, patient satisfaction data from an interprofessional student-run free clinic are described, and these results are quantitatively compared to similar data obtained from a non-interprofessional, non-student-run clinic in a post-experience only, non-equivalent groups design. Student-run free clinic patients reported high levels of satisfaction with the patient care team and the facility quality, and lower levels of satisfaction with waiting times. When compared to the non-student-run clinic, there was no significant difference in the high levels of patient satisfaction with the patient care teams between the clinics. Student-run free clinic patients did, however, report significantly lower levels of satisfaction with the accessibility of care and with the perceived privacy of protected health information. Overall, this report provides evidence that an interprofessional student-run free clinic is capable of performing at the level of an experienced free clinic across many domains of patient satisfaction, while also identifying notable areas for improvement within the domains of clinic accessibility and the perception of the privacy of protected health information.

Protection of health information in data mining

The paper studies issues related to privacy protection of health information in data mining. We introduce the implications of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the privacy of protected health information (PHI). We present an attribute analysis framework of health information and a technological approach for protecting PHI in data mining. Specifically, we develop such effective privacy-enhancing techniques as data filter, discretisation and randomisation and give an example of inducing the decision-trees from training data in which the values of sensitive attributes have been either removed or modified by using these techniques. The results show that we can achieve comparative predictive accuracies without accessing the original values of the sensitive attributes.