Researching the Appropriateness of Care in the Complementary and Integrative Health Professions Part 2: What Every Researcher and Practitioner Should Know About the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Practice-based Research in the United States

Objective

This paper describes a process for ensuring and documenting Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance in clinical practice-based research.

Methods

The Center of Excellence for Research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine was funded by National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health to develop the methods for researching the appropriateness of care in complementary and integrative health, which previously was known as complementary and alternative medicine. We recruited 125 participating chiropractic clinics for enrolling patients and gathering their data via the online surveys. Chiropractic clinics completed the following: (1) obtained the files of patients who provided prior consent (the prospective sample), (2) obtained the files of the patients selected randomly using specified randomization procedures (the retrospective sample), and (3) transferred all patient data to the RAND Corporation via an encrypted file.

Results

Most of the doctors of chiropractic from clinical practices had no concerns about obtaining and transferring the files of patients who provided informed consent. However, some doctors were uneasy about allowing the researchers to access the randomly selected files of patients who had not provided prior authorization. This led us to develop a set of forms to provide clinics about HIPAA compliance.

Conclusion

For this study, we provided clinics with information about the rules under HIPAA, demonstrated how the study complied with those rules, explained the logic behind the necessity for collecting files from both the prospective and retrospective samples, and, if requested, provided clinics with a confidentiality agreement signed by the study principal investigator and an organizational contracts representative. The process we developed may assist other complementary and integrative health researchers and practitioners in future studies.