Federal Government Finally Issues HIPPA Compliance Rules

The federal government finally has issued guidelines for complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, some nine years after the legislation was enacted. The new guidelines, designed to ensure the privacy of medical information as it is exchanged by doctors, pharmacists, insurance companies and others in the health-care industry, would have been a lot more useful in, say, 1998, and they aren't perfect. But they are helpful.

The guidelines, issued by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) as "Special Publication 800-66" (see "related links,"), are a combination of painfully obvious and truly useful information. But the 137-page document probably could have been a lot shorter--we don't need to know, for example, that paper copies of plans should be kept in binders.

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