When patients visit a medical facility to receive treatment, they trust that healthcare providers will safeguard their personal information. Healthcare providers have the ethical and legal responsibility of keeping patients’ personal details private.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a significant piece of legislation with regard to patient privacy. This federal law helps to ensure patients’ confidentiality. Understanding HIPAA and its regulations is crucial for nurses, as violations can result in serious consequences, including jeopardizing their nursing license.
What constitutes a HIPAA violation?
The HIPAA legislation was made a federal law in 1996 to safeguard patients’ individually identifiable health information (PHI). The law aims to help ensure that unauthorized entities don’t have access to a patient’s:
- Government name
- Home address
- Test results and diagnosis
- Treatment history
Nurses are not allowed to disclose a patient’s personal information to unauthorized parties without the patient’s consent. Healthcare providers can also indirectly violate HIPAA regulations if they don’t take the necessary measures to protect a patient’s electronic and physical medical information. Healthcare providers ought to encrypt electronic medical records and secure the physical locations of patients’ paper records.
Furthermore, disposing of patient records in a manner that leaves them accessible to unauthorized individuals, such as throwing away paper records without shredding them, is a HIPAA violation. HIPAA regulations also protect patients’ rights to access their own medical records. Withholding a patient’s medical records constitutes a HIPAA violation.
HIPAA violations and nursing licenses
HIPAA violations can be classified as minor infractions or major breaches of patient information. The consequences a healthcare provider may face hinge on:
- How much harm a patient suffered
- The intent behind the healthcare provider’s actions
- The acuteness of the violation
Even minor infractions can have a lasting impact on a nursing career if the violation causes a patient great harm or if the nurse’s intentions are malicious or self-serving. Nurses who violate HIPAA violations may face:
- Reprimand from the facility they work for
- Mandatory retraining to help ensure compliance
- Termination of employment for severe HIPAA violations
Suppose a patient reports a HIPAA violation to the state Board of Nursing; a nurse’s license may be brought into question.
Nurses whose licenses are at stake due to alleged HIPAA violations can benefit from robust legal support during this challenging time. A reliable legal group can work to find ways to safeguard their nursing licenses and salvage their careers.