Understanding the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

When it comes to hospital medical transcription, transcribers do not just translate audio to text; there are also some legal matters that have to be put into consideration when working. As a transcriber, weather you are working at home or at a transcription company, it is important to take note of the HIPAA. The HIPAA act or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a law that protects all individuals when it comes to the privacy of their medical records. Information that is exchanged during the entire transcribing process is considered private and should be disclosed to anyone else. Sometimes, some information is disclosed by accident without the knowledge of the transcriber.

There are some ways and tips in order that this information is kept private and away from the public eye during a hospital medical translation process.

Keep your work station private

When you are working at home for a surgery medical transcription company or a hospital medical transcription company, a lot of information be shared between you are and your client. Make sure that your computer or workstation is locked away from the prying eyes of your house-mates. It is important that they have no access to your computer or any file or folder that contains all this information. Most home based transcriptions working on a hospital medical transcription would have a separate computer for transcribing purposes alone; if the latter is possible it is probably the best option when it comes to protecting all private date.


Avoid discussing work details with others

It is also important that you avoid talking about patient transactions with others. It is human nature to share thoughts, especially experiences regarding work to others; but as much as possible avoid doing so. Information shared to other people has a high chance to be shared again to others. Never disclose specifics such as names of patients, what they are going through, which hospital they are in, and other specific details concerning a single person or to a specific institution. Aside from verbal communication, avoid posting such details on on-line social medium websites such as twitter and face book as well as forums and public message boards.

Make sure that a HIPAA contract exists between your employer and you

Last but not the least; make sure that there is a contract between you and your employer. A contract will make you understand more the scope and detail of a HIPAA medical transaction and what actions should be avoided so as not to break the law. If there is no such contact between two parties suggest that a contract be made by the employer so that both parties will understand the importance and privacy of all information exchanged during the entire process.

Evasive Action to Overbearing Healthcare Reform

With the June 28, 2012 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in declaring the Affordable Care Act constitutional, very important personal decisions need to be made by Joe and Jill Citizen as to how they will deal with the changes as it relates to their conscious health decisions. For instance, in order to keep the plan as cost effective as possible steps may be implemented to limit doctors in the types of treatments they can provide their patients. Is this something Joe and Jill Citizen is ready to contend with?

In the likelihood of that type of scenario affecting millions of people, there lies enormous potential for aware and free-thinking individuals to take more responsibility for their own health and well being. Preparing for the worst is, if not should be, a natural-born instinct for every human being. We prepare for bad weather by having candles or flashlights on hand should there be a power outage, going to a cellar in case of a tornado, having road salt and snow shovels on hand before the blizzard of the decade hits. Wouldn't it make sense, in the case of our health, to make preparations as well? In fact, one would say that it makes much more sense to take em>preventative measures to ensure our good health endures for as long as humanly possible.

The looming threat of being denied a critical medication or procedure to provide a work-around for a current ailment is a frightening prospect, even more so if your life depends on it. Scientific study has shown that many of today's sicknesses and diseases could easily be prevented with proper nutrition. Much of these findings were derived from the field of animal husbandry which, these days, is very big business. And as in any business if you have damaged product (diseased animals) your customers will not buy and you go out of business. One can quickly understand why reversing the sickness and disease in livestock would be very important to that particular business. The same applies to human health only with greater consequences if you, the product, is damaged due to nutritional deficiency.

Take, for example, the debilitating disease arthritis. For over 50 years those in the business of animal husbandry have been curing arthritis in their livestock with natural trace minerals found in the mineral blocks scattered in fields all over the world. Does it not make sense that the same concept of supplementing the diet with essential trace minerals would apply to the arthritic joints of human beings? We can readily see, in this example, the great benefits of taking preventative steps to curtailing the painful prospect of degenerative arthritis. It would be hard to believe that a free-thinking individual would prefer to wait and see if the care they may require would be granted or denied based on the cost effectiveness to a health care program. What factors would determine if treatment should be granted or denied? Age? Weight? Tax revenue generation of the patient?

Answering the call to take control of our personal health situations can be an intimidating concept to many people but it could not be more critical than it is at this moment. With certain aspects of the health care changes being put into place, the old proverb "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," couldn't be more true.

The 2012 Arch Intern Med red meat-mortality study: The “protective” effect of smoking

In a previous post () I used WarpPLS () to analyze the model below, using data reported in a recent study looking at the relationship between red meat consumption and mortality. The model below shows the different paths through which smoking influences mortality, highlighted in red. The study was not about smoking, but data was collected on that variable; hence this post.

When one builds a model like the one above, and tests it with empirical data, the person does something similar to what a physicist would do. The model is a graphical representation of a complex equation, which embodies the beliefs of the modeler. WarpPLS builds the complex equation automatically for the user, who would otherwise have to write it down using mathematical symbols.

The results yielded by the complex equation, partly in the form of coefficients of association for direct relationships (the betas next to the arrows), have a meaning. Some may look odd, and require novel interpretations, much in the same way that odd results from an equation describing planetary motions may have led to the development of the theory of black holes.

Nothing is actually "proven" by the results. They are part of the long and painstaking process we call "research". To advance new knowledge, one needs a lot more than a single study. Darwin's theory of evolution is still being tested. Based on various tests and partial refutations, it has itself evolved a great deal since its original formulation.

One set of results that are generated based on the model above by WarpPLS, in addition to coefficients for direct relationships, are coefficients of association called "total effects". They aggregate all of the effects, via multiple paths, between each pair of variables. Below is a table of total effects, with the total effects of smoking on diabetes incidence and overall mortality highlighted in red.

As you can see, the total effects of smoking on diabetes incidence and overall mortality are negative, but small enough to be considered insignificant. This is interesting, because smoking is definitely not health-promoting. Among hunter-gatherers, who often smoke tobacco, it increases the incidence of various types of cancer (). And it may be at the source of many of the health problems suggested by analyses on the China Study II data ().

So what are these results telling us? They tell us that smoking has an intermediate protective effect, very likely associated with its anorexic effect. Smoking is an appetite suppressor. Its total effect on food intake is negative, and strong. As we can see from the table of total effects, just below the two numbers highlighted in red, the total effect of smoking on food intake is -0.356.

Still, it looks like smoking is nearly as bad as overeating to the point of becoming obese (), in terms of its overall effect on health. Otherwise we would see a positive total effect on overall mortality of comparable strength to the negative total effect on food intake.

Smoking may make one eat less, but it ends up hastening one’s demise through different paths.