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To refocus awareness on the original mandate of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) regulations, this article will review record keeping requirements and examine patient-doctor and interdisciplinary communication as a way to improve the health care consumer's trust in the privacy of their personal information while facilitating integrated and fluid health care delivery systems. The HIPPA rules especially important in medical settings are discussed with a special emphasis on issues confronting psychologists who practice outside of medical institutions and hospitals. The article also examines important implications for practice activities when psychologists attend patients who are hospitalized. Keywords: HIPPA, hospital practice, psychological service, privacy

Psychology has been recognized as a health care science and profession, and psychologists have been working clinically with medically ill patients and within organized health care settings and hospitals for decades. The potentially daunting environment of organized health care should be seen by psychology as an opportunity to further develop and expand its scope of practice. With knowledge of that environment's rules, regulations, ethics, bylaws, and traditions, the clinically competent psychologist who is first seeking to practice in hospitals should succeed alongside psychologists with busy practices who are already exclusively or occasionally within an organized health care setting or medical facility. This article reviews issues of competency, credentialing, privileges, bylaws, and practice expansion to guide psychologists toward a successful hospital practice with medically ill patients. Keywords: hospital practice, health psychology, health care, credentials and privileges

This article summarizes the results from the Intervention Work Group of the Competencies Conference. Future Directions in Education and Credentialing in Professional Psychology. The generic charge presented to the Intervention Work Group was 'to address issues related to interventions.' The Intervention Work Group identified four competency components of knowledge, skills, and abilities: (a) foundational competencies; (b) intervention planning; (c) intervention implementation; and (d) intervention evaluation competencies. A fifth component that included 'practice management' was labeled as 'others.' Each component is discussed, including competencies that were deemed an essential knowledge, skill, and/or value. A discussion of training for intervention competence and assessing that intervention competence is included. Future directions for the science and practice of psychology in the intervention arena are summarized. This is one of a series of articles published in this issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Several other articles that resulted from the Competencies Conference will appear in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice and The Counseling Psychologist. Keywords: intervention: therapy; training

Linked to increasing consumer demand for access to health care information and to the worldwide expansion of telecommunication services, telehealth has emerged as a new domain of practice within professional psychology. Psychologists who plan to incorporate telecommunication technologies (e.g., Internet and point-to-point videoconferencing) into their practices should first conduct a self-assessment and then enhance their knowledge and skills in using these alternative forms of service delivery. The current article provides a self-study framework, known as STEPS, for psychologists to use in planning for telehealth practice. STEPS focuses on 5 key domains of telehealth practice and organizes specific self-study questions around each of these domains.