Q Oh, I had no idea. What does HIPAA stand for?
A So it's the Health Information Portability Act. The other important thing to know is the context. That it was actually written in 1996. So throw your mind back to 1996 when it was about 10% of American adults had access to the Internet. This was a time when we weren't sure what was really going to be the impact of technology on health care. And yet there were visionary people who said this is going to be important that people have access and that people are able to take that data and have it Centered on the consumer, centered on the patient. The idea is that patients should be able to get access to the data and redirect it the places that they want it to go. So in the modern world, we now talk about that in terms of an API, that somebody could get access to their data and direct it to an app, or direct it to where they want to go, or be the conduit that creates the interoperability between two clinicians, which unfortunately is sometimes the case. Well, that's actually the spirit of HIPAA.
AI assessment note: “So it's the Health Information Portability Act.”