Law Students

The following is paraphrased version of the introduction to the HIPAA Survival Guide(HSG):

This Survival Guide attempts a "forest from the trees" overview of the HIPAA Privacy and Security rules The genesis of these rules is covered in the Background section of this document. The HSG only targets a subset of covered entities, namely providers. Furthermore, the the guide focuses mostly on small providers, since this group will clearly be the most challenged by new laws and regulations, especially if their baseline understanding of HIPAA is lacking.

After writing the guide, we decided to launch an online version of the PDF to make it more accessible to the wider community. The online version has indeed received a fair amount of traction as a reference tool, and we continue to use it ourselves for this very reason. Recently, the full text of the HITECH Act was added online so that a user can point and click to a relevant section of the statute and thereby read the primary authority as it is written, as opposed to relying on someone else's interpretation.

That is not say that interpretations are not important, the language of the HITECH Act and the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules is dense and confusing, even for lawyers that read this sort of thing for a living, but at the end of the day the wider community is better served by at least acquiring a minimal level of literacy with respect to the controlling legal authority itself. In short, we believe that better legally educated clients add significant value to compliance process.

The next release of the online version will contain not only our paraphrased interpretation of Rules but the full text as well. In every place that a section of the Rules refers to another section (which happens often) the user will be able to click on the referenced section. In short, since compliance with HIPAA's Privacy and Security Rules is now part of HHS' definition of meaningful use, it will be important for a larger number of stakeholders to understand their ramifications, especially since a provider or facility may not get paid their EHR incentives if they are found to be non-HIPAA compliant.

In general, the HITECH Act totally transforms the HIPAA regulatory landscape with respect to privacy and security, changing it from a paper tiger into an electronic beast. In order to effectively cope with this beast, better tools need to be made availabe. We believe that the HSG is step in the right direction.