The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 HIPAA Essay

MS-6650
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The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is critical law in the U.S healthcare system. It protects sensitive information or data for patients by ensuring that health information is not disclosed without patients' consent and knowledge. This federal law is problematic, especially when dealing with specific healthcare issues such as family therapy when it entails open discussions, leading to violation of privacy rights as espoused in HIPAA. Maintaining confidentiality in family therapy is difficult, owing to the involvement of multiple parties.
Family and couple or couple therapy is a form of psychotherapy that conceptualizes conflict as dysfunctional interactions within the family or marriage relationship (Barnett & Jacobson, 2019). Therapists are expected to observe confidentiality when handling client issues in family and marriage related therapy. There are numerous ways in which challenges can arise during therapy, which requires the therapist to manage. One of the problems therapists face is determining whether or not secrets should be kept (Butler, Rodriguez, Roper & Feinauer, 2010). Another confidentiality dilemma involves some situations that therapists are faced with the challenges of breaching confidentiality or not. The therapist needs to decide when the parties should maintain secrets and when they can breach. A therapist is not permitted to reveal any person's confidence in the system-oriented therapy setting in the absence of that individual's prior written permission (Mignone et al., 2017). A therapist can apply diverse practices that ensure confidentiality in a family of marriage therapy. First, the information disclosed by each person should be treated as confidential. Second, the therapist needs to inform each party during family therapy that their therapy will be held confidential. Third, the therapist is responsible for informing the parties that certain pieces of information may need to remain confidential for personal privacies. Fourth, the parties involved in the therapy may need to be made aware that particular details may be kept confidential temporarily with the condition that it might be disclosed later (Mignone et al., 2017). The choice of which variations one can use singly or jointly. The choice of approaches to confidentiality needs substantial emphasis because it has far-reaching implications depending on the circumstances. For example, one partner may confide to the therapist that he or she has been having an extramarital affair. The therapist is always obliged to guard the secrecy of such information. Thus, in cases where privacy issues constitute a profound concern to the couple and family, the therapist must outline rules guiding treatment by defining the patients in light of confidentiality and associated limitations.
The ethical practices, regulations, legal codes, and state laws provide a blueprint on how therapists can handle confidentiality when dealing with family or marriage therapy. The practice of confidentiality...