Laws and Regulations That Apply

¶ … laws and regulations that apply to health care businesses and the health care industry. One of these is the Workplace Health and Safety Regulations, another is the HIPAA contract.

Workplace Health and Safety Regulations

Relevant to each and every aspect of our life is the safe environment that is demanded in health care facilities. There are numerous health and safety issues associated with health care agencies and centers, and all of these were addressed by a series of laws passed by the American government to ensure safety and protection of both caregivers and recipients of care.

Some of the issues include chemical and gas exposures or hazards from lifting and certain potentially dangerous tasks, respiratory hazards for instance in a medical laboratory), and other occupations associated with large healthcare facilities that contain a certain element of risk to them.

OSHA standards (Occupational Safety and Health Act) created by Nixon in December 30, 1970, refers to the specific laws and regulations that were implemented to prevent work-related injuries, illnesses, and fatality by issuing and ensuring standards for workplace implementation of safety, hygiene and health (Osha.gov). Although related to workplaces in general, many if not all of its directives apply to health care centers and institutions, and have special procedures implemented to that effect (such as regards laboratory procedures and chemical emissions). In fact, it has been calculated that nursing homes and personal care facilities have one of the highest rates of injury and illnesses amongst industries in general (http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/nursinghome/index.html).

The HIPAA contract.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) refers to a convention of information privacy laws that protects information of individuals and prevents their data from being revealed unless it were for a significant reason. Great confidentiality and care must be taken to ensuring security and protection of data.

This Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in August 21, 1996, and is also known as the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA-Public Law 104-191) or the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information (http://whatishipaa.org/).

More specifically, it stated that an individual who is under the care of any health organization, public or private, be it mental or physical health is subject to: (i) procedures of privacy rights. Namely that information regarding his health or person cannot be revealed to others without his or her permission, and (ii) that there should be established procedures for the exercise of these privacy rights (Ibid.).

The advantages with HIPAA is that it gives individuals control over their health information, as well as establishing national standards that health care providers must comply with and helps to limit inappropriate manipulation of individual by health care facility or corruption of its ethical procedures.

A problem with HIPAA, however, is that the mechanism used to authenticate a patient and to enable him access to his or her private records is the individual's social security identification. This alone is problematic in that it serves to reduce privacy. The privacy rule does permit disclosure under special circumstances where an individual's permit is not needed.