Medical Mutual Insurance Company of Maine: Resources

Privacy and your patients: Practical guidance for HIPPA compliance.

Resources » HIPAA

To help healthcare providers meet the privacy mandates of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), a task force from the Physician Insurers Association of America (PIAA) — of which Medical Mutual is a member — developed the following resource materials. We provide them here as tools to assist you with your HIPAA compliance and educational activities.

Guidance from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS: Summary of the HIPAA Security Rule

This is a summary of key elements of the Security Rule including who is covered, what information is protected, and what safeguards must be in place to ensure appropriate protection of electronic protected health information. Because it is an overview of the Security Rule, it does not address every detail of each provision.

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/srsummary.html

When using the tools, please remember:

Disclaimer for the PIAA HIPAA Guide

A task force from the Physician Insurers Association of America (PIAA) for their member companies, which includes Medical Mutual Insurance Company of Maine, developed the following HIPAA documents.

These documents were developed as tools to assist the insureds of the MMIC in their HIPAA compliance and educational activities. When using the tools, please remember:

The tools address only the requirements of the federal Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information as implemented pursuant to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). They must be adapted to incorporate other relevant state and federal laws and regulations.
The tools are based solely on the interpretation of the HIPAA Privacy regulations by PIAA staff and the PIAA’s HIPAA Task Force members. These tools have not been reviewed or approved by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
HHS has expressed its intention to issue further guidance on, and modification to, the Privacy Rules. The attached tools must be reviewed for necessary changes based on new information from HHS.

While every effort has been made to draft these documents in an accurate and complete manner, neither the PIAA, members of the PIAA Task Force, nor Medical Mutual Insurance Company of Maine guarantees their accuracy or completeness. Users of these documents should contact their own counsel in this regard to tailor the documents to apply to their specific situation.

The white papers below are PDF (Portable Document Format) and DOC (Microsoft Word) documents. The Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in is required to open the PDFs and Word is required to open the DOCs. The Acrobat Reader is free from the Adobe website: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Documents

HIPAA Policies and Procedures