Case study on HIPAA State/Federal Regulations Pick One of the two scenarios

Unit outcomes addressed in this Assignment:

Define Key Terms

Apply policies and procedures for access and disclosure of protected health information (PHI)

Describe ownership of the physical record and the information in it

Differentiate between consents that are sufficient to release PHI and those which are not

Release protected health information to authorized user

Course outcome assessed/addressed in this Assignment:

HI135-3: Summarize the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and state/federal regulations which govern the release of protected health information.

Instructions

Write a two page paper responding to one of the two cases below. Respond thoroughly to the question posed at the end of the case study. Cite your sources and use appropriate APA guidelines. Support your responses with information from the reading in Chapter 10 as well as HIPAA guidelines.

You are the director of health information services at a tertiary-care hospital. You and the director of emergency room services are jointly responsible for reporting instances of communicable disease, child abuse, and cancer to the appropriate state authority. You have just completed an audit of your institution’s reporting mechanism and discovered that the reporting requirements are not consistently met. The audit could not definitively establish whether the reporting never occurred or occurred but was not documented in the patient’s health record. Discuss what legal issues are present and what approaches you should take to resolve this problem.

You are the head of the health information management department at General Hospital. An FBI agent has arrived at your office with a search warrant in hand. He asks to speak with you about the hospital’s health record. How should you respond?

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