Why people hate HIPAA

Working with clients over the years, we have come to the conclusion that most people hate HIPAA. There we said it! Fortunately we don’t take it personally because we actually understand why people hate HIPAA. Here are a few valid reasons.

• HIPAA is confusing
• HIPAA is boring
• HIPAA is expensive
• HIPAA gets in the way of medical professionals doing their job
• HIPAA and HIPAA fines are scary

The list goes on and on.

Let’s take a look at the first two bullet points.  HIPAA is confusing and boring.  It would be hard to argue that these two points aren’t true.  HIPAA has two rules (privacy and security); administrative, technical and physical safeguards that must be implemented; required and addressable implementation specifications; and the text of the combined HIPAA regulations is over 84 pages (PDF) and is written such that it is almost impossible to understand for most people.

Further adding to the issue is that the HIPAA policies and procedures that are required to comply with the regulations are usually long, confusing and boring to most employees. The reason you have policies and procedures is to ensure that your employees follow the proper steps to protect patient information. But if the policies and procedures are boring and confusing then there is a good chance that your employees won’t read them and won’t follow the defined procedures. In this case, having policies and procedures is basically worthless.

We got this message loud and clear and have come up with an innovative solution to the problem. We try to make HIPAA understandable, easy and even fun! If your employees find that understanding the HIPAA regulations and policies and procedures are easy then the chances that they will comply increase dramatically.

In order to make the HIPAA Security policies and procedures easy to understand we took a non-traditional approach. We understood that most employees will not read the 150+ pages of all 18 policies and procedures so we did two things to ensure that they still understand the content of the polices.

• For each of the 18 policies we provide an easy to read overview. This is basically the “cliff notes” version of the policy and highlights the important issues.
• We created a fun and interactive short movie for each of the 18 policies and procedures.  The movies are usually under 2 minutes and are actually fun to watch. They give a great representation of the policies and discuss the details of each of the procedures. Client feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Take a look at the below video that shows how we make the HIPAA policies and procedures easy to understand and even fun!