A series of guides designed to help California health plans, providers, and pharmacists understand the requirements of the new Federal Health Privacy Rule are available from the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF). The guides explain how the new federal privacy laws interact with existing California privacy law. The deadline for compliance is April 2003.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) mandates compliance with the Federal Health Privacy Rule. "Most California health care organizations will be required to make major changes in how they maintain, shield, and disclose individual medical information," according to the guides' author, Joy Pritts, J.D., of the Health Privacy Project at Georgetown University's Institute for Health Care Research and Policy. "The new law creates new rights for patients, requires contracts with privacy protections between health care organizations and many of their business associates where none were required before, and extends California's statutory privacy protections for written medical data to many oral communications."
Implementing the Federal Health Privacy Rule in California compares California's existing privacy requirements with the new national standard, and identifies ways various health-related entities responsible for safeguarding patient data might comply with both.
Three versions of the guide are available, tailored to the needs of different sectors of the health care industry: Health Care Providers; Health Insurers and Health Care Service Plans; and Pharmacists, Physical Therapists, and Others. The guides are available for download through the link below.
"These guides serve as an excellent resource for health care organizations to understand the new privacy requirements," said Sam Karp, CHCF's chief information officer. "Californians' medical information will be more accessible, more portable, yet better protected when the new national standards are in place. The guides are designed to support the industry's compliance efforts."
CHCF also provides a broader HIPAA resource, prepared by the Pacific Health Policy Group, titled HIPAA Administrative Simplification: Tool Kit for Small Groups and Safety-Net Providers. It is available for download through the link below.
The Health Privacy Project, located in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to raising public awareness of the importance of ensuring health privacy in order to improve health care access and quality, both on an individual and a community level.