Regulatory Compliance
Health care is a highly regulated industry and continues to tighten and continually develop criteria according to which providers are required to abide by in order to carry out business. It has been estimated that HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) cost 33 cents for every health care dollar spent between 1996 and 2002. The health care industry covers a wide array of participants all of which all are inevitably subjected to a multitude of regulations and who are all required to exercise compliance to avoid fines and penalties. This poses as one of the leading factors and challenges that the practice of healthcare faces today.
In light of the fact that regulation increases the difficulty in which a healthcare facility operates potentially causing huge losses in revenue it also brings with it positive aspects and outcome from which an organisation can capitalise on.
Concepts and Strategies
Gartner, 2003 identified security for privacy and data collection compliance as one of the top 10 issues within healthcare at the time and an area of which absolute importance was misunderstood and the cost of significant spending by healthcare organisations. Breeches in confidentiality could lead to major law suits, and loss of medical records posing further spiral of unnecessary financial expenses.
Data recording is an important aspect in healthcare as it tracks the patients all important background and history and speeds up the time taken to assess new patients by ensuring continuity of consistent and quality treatment. It is for this very reason that health care organisations depend on electronic databases and informatics to track and record patient information. Not only does it track diagnosis, treatments number of visits, patient history but also age, gender, ethnicity, location, insurance details and the like. This
References: Net IQ,‘’Addressing Regulatory Compliance in the Healthcare Industry ‘’, (January 2006) John Dugan, 2010 ‘’Challenges faced by providers-Minimising risk and reducing cost of regulatory compliance’’ (www.pwc.com)