Are you a covered entity (CE) or business associate (BA) as defined by HIPAA? There are literally millions of organizations in the U.S. that fall under these definitions, and possibly additional millions of BAs outside of the U.S. providing services to U.S.-based CEs. The impact is significant, and truly world-wide. If you are a CE or BA, did you know that your information security and privacy activities, or lack thereof, could cause physical harm to patients and insureds, and that you can receive significant penalties under the new HIPAA rules based upon those impacts? (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Mega Rule’
How Physical Harm Impacts Can Drive Huge HIPAA Penalties
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013Are You Ready to Pay for the Sins of Your Contracted Entities?
Sunday, February 3rd, 2013Over the years when working with a wide range of organizations, helping them to identify where all forms of their business information (including customer, client, patient and employee information) is located. One of the key activities is identifying and documenting all business associates, service providers, business partners, and all other types of outsourced entities that possess or have other types of access to this information. (more…)
Why You Should Use a Right to Audit Clause
Thursday, January 24th, 2013A Tale of Two Viewpoints
When I was responsible for information security and privacy at a large financial and healthcare organization throughout the 1990’s I had literally hundreds of business partner organizations to which we outsourced various types of activities that required some type of access to our client and customer information. Add to that several hundred agents and, scarier still because they were not exclusively selling our products, brokers, and you can probably imagine the angst I felt when thinking about the ways in which all those other organizations were putting our information at risk. The contracts with them had a very brief requirement to “provide appropriate security controls” for the information, but that did not alleviate my worries. But, since at that time there were no data protection regulations in effect, the lawyers said this simple clause was enough. And then one of the outsourced entities had an incident resulting from lack of controls which allowed a hacker to enter our network. (more…)
Should You Rush to Execute a BA Agreement Today? Probably Not
Thursday, January 24th, 2013The final HIPAA “mega rule” is going to be officially published on the Federal Register tomorrow, January 25, 2013. Currently the version available (https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2013-01073.pdf) is “pre-publication” version.
Over the past week I’ve had numerous CEs and BAs contacting me, frantic to change their BA Agreements to “avoid complying with the Mega Rule for another year!” Wait, folks. You are misunderstanding; this is a very specific extension that only applies to the BA Agreements. Let me explain… (more…)
