In the phase two the office of civil rights says that the agreement inspections are now about to process. In the last months of previous year, the covered firms were chosen for counter inspections and now the first phase of those inspections have been done. Presently, the OCR has progressed to the inspection of corporate affiliates of the covered firms.
The inspections done in the second phase of the HIPAA agreement audits were comprehensive in nature. These inspections were completed in the year of 2011 and 2012. These counter inspections have looked into a wide range of requests by the HIPAA security, privacy, break warning rules and regulations. Although, these inspections only included a number of documentation to be checked by the auditors.
The onsite inspections will be more comprehensive as well as the auditors will check deeper into the firms’ documentation and practices. The firms will be asked to demonstrate the documentation which are in compliance with the HIPAA laws and the office of civil rights will be checking the signs and marks of HIPAA. In order to help the whole process to be carried out in a proper manner, the AHIMA is also playing a very important role. They have simplified a toolkit for HIPAA inspection.
This toolkit could be of great use. They can use it to analyze the efforts made by the firms in order to make and complete the important documents, strategies, procedures to meet the HIPAA requirements. It will possess all legal details of the inspection and its consequences. The office of civil rights will use this toolkit in the second phase of counter inspections. This is an updated version of audit protocol of HIPAA.
The newly launched toolkit possess HIPAA compliance lists which contains the rules, procedures as well as documents which the auditors may ask by the firm top management. This will all together make a master plan which will run things smoothly for both the auditors and the firm. AHIMA is also focusing on the tips which will help HIPAA to provide assistance to the firms who are interested in following the rules properly.
