What is HIPAA and how does it affect patient care?

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ) is a set of rules and regulations designed to protect the privacy of patients with respect to health related issues. Basically it means that nobody has any business knowing anything about what doctor you are seeing and why, what medicines you are taking and why and which hospital you are in and why you are there. Unless you are a close relative, a doctor, or medical related person who has a good reason to know so as a medical insurance company. A person can also specify what other people should have access to such information.

This limits what kind of information medical people can tell others, what records can be kept and who can have access to them and what medical information can be put into an email or transmitted over a public internet and how it should be protected such as with encryption.