Did you see that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released some new guidance documents for the Healthcare Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule compliance activities on September 17?
I need to go through them more thoroughly, but upon a quick scan they look like they contain some pretty good, and interesting, guidance information for both patients and healthcare providers…
Posts Tagged ‘HIPAA’
New HHS Guides For HIPAA Privacy Rule
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Insider Threat Examples & 7th HIPAA Criminal Conviction
Monday, August 25th, 2008Yesterday I read about the 7th criminal conviction and sentencing that has been given under HIPAA, “Woman gets 14 months in ID theft case.”
Insider Threat Examples: HIPAA Violations Go UnPenalized In Iowa
Sunday, August 17th, 2008When I got my Sunday Des Moines Register out of the orange box across the road this morning, the front page headline leaped out at me, “Medical privacy law fails to stop snooping.”
In one of the incidents described, a woman was incredibly embarrassed and humiliated after all the intimate details about an operation she had on her uterus, including her full name, that were in her doctor’s files were apparently published in marketing material…
First HIPAA Sanction Applied! $100,000 + Required Actions
Friday, July 18th, 2008My jaw almost dropped early this morning when I saw the press release from the HHS yesterday, “HHS, Providence Health & Services Agree on Corrective Action Plan to Protect Health Information”
Is it about time the HHS actually enforced HIPAA? Yes!
Without applied sanctions for noncompliance, laws and regulations are meaningless and ineffective.
I’m going to look at the Resolution Agreement closely and comment on that soon…in the meantime here is the full press release:
HIPAA Humor: Dumb Robber
Thursday, June 5th, 2008Here’s a story that gave me a bit of a chuckle, “Note leads police to robbery arrest“…
Business Leader Primer for Effective Information Disposal
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008I’ve been talking a lot lately about the need for business leaders to more effectively address the secure disposal of information, particularly personally identifiable information (PII). Why? Because it seems like more and more attention is being given to security technologies to protect day-to-day business…attention is good and MUST be done…but often it seems it is at the expense of then overlooking, or perhaps shrugging off, how to securely dispose of PII, systems, applications and hardware when they are no longer needed in the business. This has led to many information security incidents and privacy breaches.
I address the reasons why business leaders must give attention to information disposal in the second article of my May issue of IT Compliance in Realtime, “Business Leader Primer for Effective Information Disposal.”
Download a PDF version to get a much nicer-looking copy, the super-duper graphic I put into the article, plus the sidebar information and facts. Here is an unformatted version of the article…
More On The HHS HIPAA Compliance Activities
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Today I communicated with Sue Marquette Poremba at SC Magazine for an article she published this afternoon, “Proliferating HIPAA complaints and medical record breaches”
She had seen my blog posting from yesterday, “HIPAA Complaints And Associated Resolutions Since 2003” and asked me some follow-up questions.
Here is the full reply I sent to her, much of which she used within her article, but with some other points I want to note as well…
HIPAA Complaints And Associated Resolutions Since 2003
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has required compliance from covered entities (CEs) since 2003. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the Federal agency with regulatory oversight for compliance; with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) responsible for Privacy Rule enforcement and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for Security Rule enforcement. Why two different offices to perform enforcement activities? No good reason was ever given.
I was just out looking on the HHS’s HIPAA compliance and enforcement site.
On May 12, 2008, they provided some interesting statistics from their enforcement activities from the past 5 years. Looks like they love Excel and the graphing capabilities! 🙂 I want to share some of the statistics with you…
A Couple Of Little Known HIPAA Facts
Thursday, May 8th, 2008Last week I was contacted by Corey Goodman, a reporter for HCPro, about a story he is doing that sounds like it will be quite interesting! He is collecting examples and anecdotes about “little know HIPAA facts” and asked me to contribute some for his article.
I anticipate that he will be cutting the couple of little known facts I provided to him down quite a bit, so I wanted to provide them here not only as a future reference for myself, but also for those of you who may be interested!
Do We REALLY Need Doctors To Do Consultations Via Email?
Friday, April 25th, 2008A few months ago I had some lively back-and-forth blog postings with a doctor who used email and instant messaging (IM) a lot in his practice; here, here and here.
Today my good friend Alec forwarded me another interesting news article (thanks Alec!) about the use of email by doctors; “It’s no LOL: Few US doctors answer e-mails from patients.”
