PIPA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Its original purpose was to protect people from losing their health insurance if they change jobs or have pre-existing health conditions. HIPAA has been expanded over the years to also help reduce the cost and administrative burdens of healthcare transactions, and most recently to develop standards and requirements to protect the privacy and security of personal health information. It's HIPAA privacy and security rules that we'll cover here. HIMNO's privacy and security rules require healthcare organizations to adopt processes and procedures to ensure the highest degree of patient confidentiality. It makes sense patients desire their information to be secure and rely on you to keep it safe and confidential. Personal health information (PHI) can be created, stored, or transmitted in many formats through verbal conversations, written documents, over computer software or hardware, and in various other forms. All require security and confidentiality measures to be implemented. PHI may include anything in the patient health records, such as lab results, medical history, images, and more. It also includes other patient information like names, birth dates, social security numbers, email addresses, and other information that can be used to create identity theft. It seems like every day we hear about another data breach. Keeping patient information safe is what HIPAA governs and what you are responsible to protect. A covered entity under HIPAA may not use or disclose protected health information unless a patient authorizes its disclosure in writing. However, we may disclose protected health information without an individual's authorization for any of the following purposes or situations: 1) to any individual that has been authorized by the patient for treatment, payment, or general healthcare operations, or 3) if the individual has the opportunity to agree or object to a disclosure, for example, when the...