Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA, frequently reasonably misspelled as HIPPA), requests special acts to be done to insure safety and security of health care data, including those for patients, health plan participants and beneficiaries, and so on.
In upating or implementing IT systems, hospitals realize the less competancy of the security standards of the current wireless LAN systems and protocols in compliance with what HIPAA requested. Hospitals and health care providers are discussing about using more secured WPA encryption protocol. Many other products are aiming at this market to target the compliance issues.
This is not really directly technology related but another downside of HIPAA has been our ability to volunteer in hospitals. I work with an organization that had been volunteering with Motts Hospital for the past 5/6 years. In the last 2 years we have not been able to do any volunteer events because there is a clause in HIPAA that won't let our volunteers on site!! Crazy.
Posted by: Anant | February 10, 2006 at 05:38 PM