Department of Health and Human Services to Change HIPAA to HIPPA

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announced last Monday that they are changing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPPA to an as yet undisclosed name but is willing to confirm the acronym will be HIPPA.

Dr Mantis Toboggan made the following statement in a phone interview, “you guys win, you beat us. At first we were okay with constantly correcting providers who wrote H-I-P-P-A….we would tell them politely that it is actually H-I-P-A-A, but we can only do that so much. At one point we were even paying 5 people to do nothing but correct people on the internet when they used the incorrect acronym…but when one of the workers committed suicide on the job, screaming they were right, they were right all along H-I-P-P-A, before taking his own life….well we knew we had to employ other methods.”

Facing what Dr Toboggan sites as “insurmountable odds against the tides of lowered standards” the department has conceded it would just be easier to rename the act as “HIPPA” as 80% of health care providers spell it that way anyhow”. A search of pubmed for the words, “facebook” “HIPPA” and “privacy” estimates that usage of the incorrect acronym “HIPPA” may be occurring in excess of 95% of the posts on facebook.

Dennis Reynolds is the subcommittee chairperson of the task force to come up with the new name. “We know we need to have the word privacy in there. Everyone assumes it is one of the P’s anyway.” He stated in an interview last week.

A recent poll asked 1000 health care workers what the acronym HIPAA stood for. The results were shocking to the DHHS. Out of 1000 people 6 people were able to say the correct 5 words. Over 60% of the people replied that it was, “you know, the privacy act thing”.