HIPAA was created to help guard personal medical information and to help people retain their health insurance coverage for existing conditions, even if they change their jobs. Known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, it has helped to create a variety of safety nets for patients. But there is also red tape to take into consideration pertaining to the coverage.
List of Pros of HIPAA
1. Protecting Patients
The first and most important part of HIPAA is to ensure that patients are given confidentiality and that their healthcare test results are to be handled by a specific group of people. Insurers, health care facilities, hospitals, or independent physician offices have a certain set of strict rules about disclosing information about a person’s condition to people who are unauthorized to have the information.
2. Providing Minimal Information
This is beneficial for both the patient and healthcare providers as they can minimize the information needed when it comes to filing transactions for patients. Instead of having to disclose an individual’s full medical history, HIPAA allows physicians to provide only the information that is necessary for the matter at hand. This could mean eliminating the need for pages of medical history to a single page of information.
3. Obtaining Regular Coverage
One concern that many people have when they switch jobs is their inability to keep coverage for an existing medical condition. With HIPAA it limits the ability for employers to exclude coverage for medical conditions that employees have essentially “brought with them”. In most cases, employees don’t have to worry about losing important coverage.
List of Cons of HIPAA
1. Paperwork Concerns
Even though HIPAA is beneficial for patients, it also adds an additional burden of more paperwork on the shoulders of medical practitioners. They will have to fill out a multitude of forms to ensure that they abiding by the law and following regulations for each individual patient.
2. Unavailability of Information
Physicians have become so concerned with the penalties associated with disclosing too much information that they have begun to disclose too little. This can result in doctors refusing to mail results of health tests, forcing patients to pick them up from the office in person. At times, hospitals will have to have individual doctors write written requests to get information about a patient’s condition when they are admitted instead of making a quick phone call. Overall, HIPAA is far more time consuming, which can eat away at healthcare costs and availability.