Discuss concerns that arise around HIPAA and telehealth. Provide an explanation of legal concerns that you have with implementing telehealth.

Discuss concerns that arise around HIPAA and telehealth. Provide an explanation of legal concerns that you have with implementing telehealth.

Discuss concerns that arise around HIPAA and telehealth. Provide an explanation of legal concerns that you have with implementing telehealth.

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Telehealth and HIPAA Sample  Paper

The US passed a law on August 21, 1996, termed as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), that would ensure that patients’ privacy is upheld when it comes to protecting their personal health information. However, the law covers healthcare providers, health plans, and some business associates and grants them the legal rights to access patient information (Kuziemsky et al., 2020). Telehealth provides care to patients in remote areas who cannot reach a medical facility at the required time through a digital platform such as a mobile app or a phone call. Individuals covered by the law to access personal patient information must maintain the confidentiality and privacy of their patients regardless of whether they use telehealth. However, Concerns have risen about telehealth’s integrity in promoting HIPAA.

Patients’ safety and security are significant concerns when using HIPAA and telehealth. Telehealth is prone to security threats such as cyber-attacks. Hence, it may interfere with patient data confidentiality, and patients may be targeted for malicious reasons (Tazi et al., 2023). Therefore, telehealth needs to ensure its data is safely encrypted through firewalls. Also, the system should allow only authorized personnel to access its servers by using a unique user identifier password only known to the authorized personnel.

Another concern is the acquisition of informed consent from the patients, as some healthcare providers may provide medical services without the patient’s consent. Informed consent is necessary for the provision of any medical services. As part of the requirements of the HIPAA, healthcare providers, and other covered entities are obliged to seek informed consent and authorization from the patient before proceeding with any form of medical intervention (Kuziemsky et al., 2020). Telehealth may fail to provide a platform for seeking patient consent, which may jeopardize its integrity.

References

Kuziemsky, C. E., Hunter, I., Gogia, S. B., Kulatunga, G., Rajput, V., Subbian, V., &Basu, A. (2020). Ethics in telehealth: Comparison between guidelines and practice-based experience-the case for learning health systems. Yearbook of Medical Informatics, 29(01), 044-050.https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055/s-0040-1701976.pdf

Tazi, F., Nandakumar, A., Dykstra, J., Rajivan, P., & Das, S. (2023). Privacy, Security, and Usability Tradeoffs of Telehealth from Practitioners’ Perspectives. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05725. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.05725