HIPAA Compliance Training of Nursing Services Staff Curriculum Development - HIPAA

Educational need and rationale. The primary educational need of nurses at Heart of Lancaster Regional Medical Center is training in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The basis for identification of this need was the administration of semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with nursing services staff at Heart of Lancaster medical center. The results of the interviews and survey showed a clear lack of knowledge about HIPAA. In addition, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 contains provisions for medical records privacy for storage, transmission, and disclosure that link directly to HIPAA. Essentially, the two pieces of legislation create double jeopardy when any practices by medical personnel or medical institutions are not in compliance with HIPAA. Because of the potential for substantive fines for violation of either of The Acts, it is evident that an educational program on HIPAA should be undertaken with nursing services staff as soon as possible. The focus of the educational program is on prevention of violations of HIPAA.

Instructional design methods. The basic plan for the educational program the use of videos to provide HIPAA compliance information, followed by summative assessment. The videos selected for this training program may all be accessed online for free, and they portray a non-compliant error with regard to HIPAA regulations. A pilot test of the proposed instructional plan will be conducted with 100 employees. The pilot will provide important information about the effectiveness of the training, as participants will take a quiz following their training session, and will also make salient any weaknesses in questions structure or content, and highlight any areas of the training content that are problematic and indicate changes to make instruction more robust or focused. The goal of the training is to have every participating member of the nursing staff achieve mastery of the content. In pursuit of this goal, any staff member who does not pass the initial assessment will be provided with repeat opportunities until retesting results in mastery of the content.

Learner characteristics. The learners in this educational program are all members of the nursing services staff. On average, the 200 plus nurses employed at the medical center have six years of experience in a full-service medical facility,...

As adult learners, they exhibit certain preferences for learning that must be considered in the instructional design. The following attributes tend to be true of adult learners:
Adult learners look for educational and training opportunities that address problem they encounter in their day-to-day life. As a group, they are less future-oriented than younger learners, and they tend to be problem-centered.

Adult learners tend to be results-oriented and have come to the learning situation with specific goals and outcomes in mind. Further, they tend to not return to a learning situation that does not show promise of meeting those objectives.

Adult learners tend to be self-directed and accept responsibility for their own learning.

Adult learners are often skeptical about new methods or new information. A hands-on trial period is often a preferred introduction to new requirements or practices.

Adult learners seek education and training that relates to their needs as they perceive them, and they seek timeliness and congruence with their lives as they are currently living them.

In summary, adult learners are autonomous, practical, self-directed, goal-directed and relevancy-oriented. They need to connect new learning to their life experiences and knowledge base.

Learning theory. The principle learning theory applied in this educational program is Bandura's social learning theory. Albert Bandura argued that people learn with a social context and that modeling and observation can both facilitate learning. Bandura held that behavioral change in an institutional context could be achieved through modeling. Further, he theorized that observational learning could occur through verbal instruction, live modeling, and symbolic representation. The proposed education and training model described in this paper makes direct use of Bandura's symbolic representation for observational learning through the use of media -- which in this training program takes the form of video.

Bandura based his social learning theory on the principle of reciprocal determinism. He regarded the environment, an individual's own personal attributes, and the environment to all have reciprocal influence on each other. For modeling to result in learning, Bandura argued that certain…