HIPPA PII Protection
IFSM 201
Due
04 Oct 2015

Everyone has heard about HIPPA, which is the common acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This federal regulation has three priorities that focus on are protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of patient electronic protected health information (EPHI), guarding against reasonable possible expectable threats to the security or integrity of said EPHI, and protecting EPHI against unauthorized disclosure (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2008) . The protection of the CIA of EPHI is important because our patients rely on this information’s accuracy and availability in emergency situations for use by medical professionals, while the confidentiality is important to ensure this personal information does not fall into the wrong hands and to ensure the patient’s civil rights are not violated.
There have been many recent high level HIPPA violations recently. Some of the most damaging breaches that released the most protected personal information (PII) occurred at the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2013 one of the largest known EPHI/PII breaches at the VA was discovered through the conduct of a thorough investigation and reported by Steven Marco of HIPAAOne.com that “found there were an astounding 14,215 violations that affected 101,018 veterans and 551 VA employees at 167 facilities since 2010. These violations included using patient information for fraudulent purposes, snooping through patient records and even sharing records publicly on social media as well as privately without patient consent. This sharing of records was both intentional and unintentional but nonetheless violates HIPAA provisions. There were even previously stolen computers and lack of encryption that led to problems concerning patient record privacy.” (Marco,