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TMA is offering a new seminar to help physicians comply with changes to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) contained in the economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year.
The seminar, Medical Records: How to Manage Them Properly, Wisely, Safely, and Risk Free, which runs through Sept. 23, also addresses the "red flag rules" to prohibit theft of patients' identities and the Texas Medical Board's rules on patients' access to their records.
The stimulus package expands HIPAA to help ensure the privacy and security of health records and personal information. As Texas Medicine reported in May, the law:
- Prohibits selling patients' medical records without their consent;
- Limits marketing of protected health information;
- Requires any entity using an electronic medical record (EMR) system to keep an audit trail of three years worth of disclosures of all people and organizations with whom it shares protected health information;
- Ensures that new business entities that weren't contemplated when HIPAA was originally written, such as EMR vendors, are subject to the same privacy and security rules as physicians by requiring business associate contracts;
- Increases monetary penalties for violations, grants attorneys general authority to file suit on behalf of a state's citizens, and requires monitoring of contracts and reporting on compliance; and
- Requires patients be notified regarding security breaches of their health information.
TMA's Health Information Technology Committee developed health information exchange principles that advocate giving patients complete control over all uses of individually identified medical data. The policy specifies that, except for emergencies, patient medical data cannot be disclosed without the patient's consent.
Action, Sept. 1, 2009
Last Published: 8/31/2009 Print this page
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