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August 09, 2005
HIPAA and Unintended Consequences
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
Like many protective laws, the HIPAA law covering the protection of your medical records comes with a small business exemption.
The exemption works both ways. Small businesses who fund their own plans don't have to comply. Neither do medical providers who don't computerize. As an NFIB alert on the law states, "Health-care providers -- such as doctors, nurses, on-site clinics, etc. -- are exempt from these regulations if they do not transmit electronically, but this exemption applies only to providers, not to group health plans." (Boldface is mine.)
The result of this is that small practices now have a major incentive not to computerize, and not to transmit anything electronically. Thus, they don't.
Instead, they hire staff, gatekeepers who stand between doctor and patient, with little or no medical training, capable of doing great damage at a single dropped message.
Now that all the HIPAA compliance deadlines have passed, the smart thing to do would be to eliminate this exemption, eliminate the incentive to stay in Lud, and to let my modems go between me and my doctor.
Think that's going to happen?
And do you think we can do anything serious to reduce medical costs otherwise?
Comments (1)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: B2B | Business Strategy | Internet | law | medicine
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. MichaelEhart on August 9, 2005 03:45 PM writes...
You are right, there is a very anti-tech bias in the medical field. I do IT and HIPAA consulting for small practices. Most of the folks in healthcare became what they are because they want to help people, and are very resistant to anything that looks like it might get in the way of care. In fact, HIPAA's first results, the Administrative Simplification Rule, reduced the number of billing, diagnosis, and treatment transaction code sets from over 300 (remember when your doctor had that enormous open file rack behind the reception desk? Every insurance company, lab, and association had its own code set) to less than a dozen. This has reduced the single patient event paperwork cost from 7 dollars to less than 1.
Permalink to CommentAs far as the Luddite Brigade is concerned, there is an actual organization dedicated to keeping practices from needing to be HIPAA compliant.
Like many other things, this can be addressed by better training. I see frontline workers who have either been scared out of their wits, or so frustrated by poor understanding of HIPAA and what it means that they cannot bring themselves to view it as anything but a giant roadblock between them and their patients.
One thing that carries over from IT, that HIPAA compliance policies usually lack, is the idea of transparancy--- that most functions of compliance should be tranparant to the user--- either by automated function or proper training so that compliance is built in to each procedure.