CAMFT Staff Attorney Luke Martin, MBA, JD, reviews best practices and HIPAA implications for therapists who decide to utilize a third party voice over internet protocol (VoIP) for client interactions.

There are many legal and ethical considerations regarding Telehealth, including HIPAA compliance and regulation issues. This article provides an overview of HIPAA considerations for implementing Telehealth, as well as options for HIPAA compliant Telehealth platforms. 

In this article, Ann Tran-Lien, JD discusses a patient’s right to access their confidential mental health information under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Diligent readers of The Therapist know that the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) will have consequences for certain health care providers, including psychotherapists, who are "covered entities" within the meaning of HIPAA.  The purpose of this article is to enable you to understand and to prepare some of the more important forms that HIPAA will require covered entities to use after April 14, 2003.

According to the Office of Civil Rights, which is the federal agency that investigates and enforces HIPAA violations, some covered entities (“CEs”) are getting themselves into difficulty under HIPAA by forgetting about HIPAA’s “minimum necessary” standard. Learn more about the minimum standard in this article.

This article is important for MFTs who are covered providers under HIPAA.  All MFTs, including trainees and interns, should have a working knowledge of it so that they will have a context for understanding changes likely to occur in the health care milieu in the coming years.

On March 16, 2006, the Final Rule for enforcing violations of HIPAA went into effect. Learn how the Final Rule gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services, or his or her designee, the authority to investigate complaints of violations of HIPAA and to impose civil monetary penalties on covered entities that violate any of HIPAA’s provisions.

In this article learn about the various component parts of HIPAA and how they fit together to protect patient's privacy.