The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires all the covered entities to follow the stipulated guidelines for maintaining the privacy of the patients’ personal information, and also puts the onus of training its employees on them. Any violation of the guidelines invites stiff penalties. In such a scenario training the employees adequately is extremely essential for all the employers of the covered entities.

The following 5 steps will help the employers in imparting a more effective and useful training to their employees.

– Training Outline: Before starting with the training exercise an employer must carefully plan out the training. This comprises of ensuring that all the relevant sections of the HIPAA laws that an employee must know about are included in the course.

– Review the Material: Once the outline is ready the material must be reviewed by an experienced instructor who will ensure that the material is up-to-date and also that the information being provided is completely accurate. In addition the instructor must also customize the training to make it relevant to the particular organization by integrating the key elements of the HIPAA laws with the in-house policies framed by the covered entity.

– Combination of Teaching Instruments: Only using lectures to impart training will get monotonous and not result in any effective learning. Instead the employer must use a combination of lectures, slide shows and discussion of cases studies to train the employees on the various aspects of HIPAA like using the industry and HIPAA law related terminology, policies of HIPAA, protected health information (PHI) and its various aspects, and how the different sections of this law are to be applied in the day to day working or when dealing with the clients.

– Sufficient Time: When imparting training in the classroom, the employers must see to it that the training is not rushed through merely as a formality, and instead must ensure that the session lasts for a reasonable amount of time so that the employees can absorb the teachings gradually for a more effective learning.

– Interactive Training: Remember that for any kind of training to be useful there should be a two-way flow. After each session sufficient opportunity must be provided to the employees to ask questions to clear their doubts. This is extremely important because carrying over any kind of doubts and confusion to the desk will defeat the purpose of the training. Also there should be a quiz so that the instructor will be able to gauge how much the trainees have actually understood. In addition asking for feedback from the trainees is vital, so that any valuable suggestion can be included in future training to make it more effective.

An employer must see to it that any new employee receives such training as soon as possible especially in case of fresher’s who do not have the working knowledge of HIPAA laws. Also such training must be repeated on a yearly or even half yearly basis depending on the changes in the guidelines. Reminders for such refresher training must be communicated to employees through emails.

For more information, please visit our HIPAA training website.

For more information, please visit our HIPAA training website http://www.hipaatrainings.com

Author Bio: For more information, please visit our HIPAA training website.

Category: Medical Business
Keywords: HIPAA Training ,HIPAA Training Course ,Health Insurance ,HIPAA laws