Ever since the US Senate endorsed it in 1996, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has set the standard for protecting Americans’ private health information. An individual’s well-being or lack thereof is strictly his or her own business, and HIPAA aims to make sure nobody’s nose is in that business unless absolutely necessary.
That’s great and all—upholding privacy rights is important—but at the same time that HIPAA has proven to be beneficial to guarding patient information, it has also proven to be a monumental challenge for the people responsible for keeping that information private. In fact, it’s just downright hard. There is a never-ending list of strict regulations that govern how an individual’s personal health information (PHI) may be used or disclosed, and there are increasingly stiff penalties for failing to comply with these regulations.