Remember the movie Office Space? One of my favorite scenes shows smarmy boss Bill Lumbergh hectoring underling Peter Gibbons about putting cover sheets on TPS reports-again. And what is a TPS report anyway? We never found out.
In a movie, silly jargon is laughable. But when it affects your business, like HHS's ongoing changes to HIPAA do, the laughs stop at compliance.
Let's back up and explain some of that alphabet soup. In 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) modified how it regulates and enforces privacy and security rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The revised regulations, which are modifications to the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement and Breach Notification Rules (often referred to as the Omnibus Rule), affect many small businesses. These incude accounting firms, insurance brokerages and law firms-in essence, any business that comes into contact with health records by virtue of its business partnerships and client relationships.
If that applies to your day-to-day operations, take note: HIPAA may apply to your business and subject it to hefty fines for noncompliance. Still don't think HIPAA affects you? Read on.
A Broader Scope for Records Handlers
It's common knowledge that hospitals, health insurance plans and other big players in the healthcare industry have always had to comply with HIPAA.
However, as a result of last year's changes, many small business associates that process, analyze and transmit medical records for the big guys must now also be directly regulated by HIPAA. This includes lawyers who handle personal injury cases, insurance brokers whose customers have filled out applications with medical histories, and subcontractors whose work puts them in contact with patient records.
Among other obligations, small businesses that handle patient records must:
Produce any medical records that a patient can't otherwise get from a hospital or insurance company (e.g., if the patient's provider doesn't have a duplicate of the same record) in a timely manner.
Implement adequate safeguards to prevent disclosure of medical records to unauthorized parties.
Document and account for any and all disclosure(s) of a patient's records.
The federal government has granted HHS some serious enforcement teeth to make sure small businesses follow the rules: Fines range from $100 to $50,000 per transgression, with a $1.5 million maximum per year. With fines like these, any business even remotely covered by changes to HIPAA needs to protect itself with bulletproof recordkeeping.
Compliance, Simplified
The new requirements have so overwhelmed some small businesses that they have opted to flee the healthcare business. But if you can properly organize your records, HIPAA compliance needn't cost your livelihood.
For instance, HIPAA requests are easy to handle if your documents are tagged, indexed and classified so your team can locate them quickly. You can start by archiving all your information, including your electronic documents, in a searchable format so that you can access all your records-even those you haven't thought about for years-with just a few keystrokes.
We'll delve more deeply into other ways to avoid HIPAA penalties in a future article. But as a general rule, the best way to comply is to organize your records so that you and everyone on your team can find information quickly and easily.
And those TPS reports? Foolproof records management means you can always find those too. Now, who took my stapler?
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Remember the movie Office Space? One of my favorite scenes shows smarmy boss Bill Lumbergh hectoring underling Peter Gibbons about putting cover sheets on TPS reports-again. And what is a TPS report anyway? We never found out.
