These rules apply to covered entities, including health plans, health care clearinghouses, such as outsourced billing companies and community health information systems and health care providers that transmit health care information in a way that is regulated by HIPAA. [Code of Federal Regulations
Title 45, Volume 1]

The Privacy Rule establishes regulations for the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). PHI is any information about health status, provision of health care, or payment for health care that can be linked to a person. This includes any part of a patient’s medical record or payment history. [Code of Federal Regulations. Title 45, Volume 1]

Security Rule deals specifically with Electronic Protected Health Information (EPHI) and requires Administrative Safeguards – policies and procedures designed to clearly show how the entity will comply with the act

Covered entities that out-source parts of their business processes to a trusted third party must ensure that their vendors also have a framework in place to comply with HIPAA requirements. Companies typically gain this assurance through clauses in the contracts stating that the vendor will meet the same data protection requirements that apply to the covered entity. Care must be taken to determine if the vendor further out-sources any data handling functions to other vendors and monitor whether appropriate contracts and controls are in place.

A contingency plan should be in place for responding to emergencies. Covered entities are responsible for backing up their data and having disaster recovery procedure. The plan should document data priority and failure analysis, testing activities, and change control procedures.

Internal audits play a key role in HIPAA compliance by reviewing operations with the goal of identifying potential security violations. Audits should be both routine and event-based.

In order to have an online backup that is HIPAA compliant you need to meet all the requirements of the Final HIPAA Security rule dated February 2003 and required after April 21, 2005.  You should ensure that a backup provider exceeds the standards set in the security rule by encrypting all data before it is sent over a secure SSL connection to the remote backup service. An effective solution is to have the Encryption Key generated by the customer and is known only to the customer and to ensure that the Key is not transmitted to the HIPAA compliant online backup server. 

A HIPAA online backup provider should encrypted the data on the server with military grade encryption and not accessible to the backup provider or employees.  Ensure that the local backup client encrypts all data prior to transmission to the remote systems. Data can only be recovered by transmitting it back to the local client that decrypts the data using the encryption key.

Post from: My Health HQ

The Department of Health and Human Services (hhs) Outlines Regulations for the Use and Dissemination of Individual Health Care Information

I was noticing a plateau and we were all burned out from working at language development, and other therapies, for so long. Even the therapists I think ( no offense intended to anyone here at all ) can benefit from taking a step back from a long term client and having the opportunity to see them later with new eyes.

If you take an extended break, I found it helpful to finalize a period of intense services with appropriate testing or probes and then repeat it when you go back. My lay observation is that therapists should not begin again after a period of no therapy with the assumption that they know the client and know what to do. And again – no offense – but since testing could be time consuming and expensive – I have seen in some therapists that they would have skipped it unless I insisted I wanted to have it done. Not specifically talking about SLP’s here – just human nature. That happened particularly with school based SLP/OT.

Also, this may not be true or necessary for all parents, but I am a researcher and I got so interested in the fields of language development, occupational therapy and neurological development that I discovered programs that I was interested in trying with my kids, and I moved on to new things that were unavailable with my present therapists.

During last summer when they were on swim team I determined that we had had enough formal OT for a while and have not gone back. This school yr my kids have/do belong to
4-H archery and sewing clubs, Scouts, Tai Shin Do Karate, cartooning classes, rec basketball. I’ m not advocating substituting life experience for therapy, in our case the years we put into formal therapy were necessary for them to get to this point. We tried sports teams and other activities in the early years and their functional skills were so poor that it was hard to participate and they were ostracized to be honest.

In one child’s case we didn’t return to private SLP therapy because of schedules, we went thru a lot of meetings with the public school and increased his speech time there so he could have more available time for sports and other “normal” kid activities with friends after school. Even tho I’ve always felt our private SLP is a better therapist for language development, now that we’ve finally gotten into the swing of it, he is doing just fine for now. His receptive language has finally really exploded. He is now getting 160 mins of SLP time at school/week, which I admit is unusual. His expressive language, apraxia and APD are still an issue but is clearly partly neurological and its going to take a long time of continued work. The most important input right at this point in time is the other children he is around – this is a huge stimulus and motivation for him and far more impacting to him in my opinion than going to evermore hours of
language therapy. But we had a long road to get him to that point. He is a young teen and friends are very important to him.

The other one was having some personality issues with our therapist, who is ultra-creative and intelligent, but maybe her strengths weren’t playing to an autism spectrum child’s need for ultra-consistency. So, we turned my dau over to a younger therapist in the practice and we are doing more drills but the work is defined and repeated and she seems to be working at her capability level. She is homeschooled and really needs structure, consistency and familiarity.

In retrospect I think that if we stop and think about what all these therapies do, you can distill them down to some form of neurological stimulation. Language has to originate in your brain, so do motor skills, etc. So my personal quest has turned to how do you stimulate the brain as a whole? Its not part of this list but the most effective therapies we have found have been nutrition, vitamin supplementation, and Zengar neurofeedback. Both my kids expressive language as well as self regulation have rocketed since we started NFB. From my observation, neurofeedback has helped my children’s neurological systems funtion better, faster and more efficiently and now the explicit therapies that address language, cognition, motor skills etc can be learned, imprinted, grooved in and retained. Another way to think about it is before we were trying to cut with a dull knife, now the knife is sharper and we are getting more precision in our work. It is not a
cure-all but it has clearly helped. On purpose I did the entire TLP program this past year alongside neurofeedback.. So its impossible for me to separate them or even to say that TLP helped, but it didn’t hurt. ( The Listening Program for auditory training)

What will be interesting over time is to see if we can measure how neurofeedback affects APD. Both my children are severely impacted in this realm and as you all know, it is not only hard on them, its also hard on parents. What I’m hoping is that all our efforts as a whole will improve working and short term memory, auditory memory, visual memory, etc. I thinkkkkkk that memory will be a key to helping functionality in APD. It is very hard for me to distinguish in the moment what part of …. I didn’t hear / I don’t understand.. . is APD, auditory memory, normal child stuff, Attention Deficit, whatever. Both my kids have good periods and bad periods with APD, its not really consistent.

Post from: My Health HQ

how long for SLP services?