Posts Tagged ‘PHI’

New HHS Guides For HIPAA Privacy Rule

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

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…

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A Stolen Health Insurer’s Laptop With PII Is Not Necessarily A HIPAA Violation

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

While scanning the news blurb summaries today, the statement, “This is a violation of HIPAA.” caught my eye. Hmm…let’s see what this is about…
This statement was actually within the reader comments to the story, “Blue Cross reports theft of computer.”

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A Stolen Health Insurer’s Laptop With PII Is Not Necessarily A HIPAA Violation

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

While scanning the news blurb summaries today, the statement, “This is a violation of HIPAA.” caught my eye. Hmm…let’s see what this is about…
This statement was actually within the reader comments to the story, “Blue Cross reports theft of computer.”

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CMS Hires A Fox To Guard The HIPAA Henhouse

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I just read a very interesting article, “CMS’ HIPAA watchdog presents potential conflict” that made me go Hmmm!!
The genesis of the article is that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that is responsible for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) oversight and compliance enforcement, has contracted PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to perform HIPAA Security Rule compliance audits during 2008.

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HIPAA, The Insider Threat & Prison Time

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

It seems there are more and more stories related to patient privacy and HIPAA popping up lately. Today another story caught my eye related to them.

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Another Hospital Suspends Staff For Violating HIPAA Requirements

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Ivinson Memorial Hospital applying sanctions to their staff for violating HIPAA requirements.
They have set a good example…another hospital has also applied sanctions…suspending 27 of their staff members for violating HIPAA requirements.

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Why Would You Trust Microsoft To Store Your Sensitive Health Information?

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

Today Microsoft launched their new web portal, HealthVault to store, for free, “medical histories, immunization and other records from doctors’ offices and hospital visits, including data from devices like heart monitors. It is also tied to a health information search engine the software maker launched last month.”

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A Hospital Actively Enforcing HIPAA Requirements!

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

It is great to see a story published about a hospital, actually any type of organization that is a covered entity (CE), that is actively and seriously trying to be in compliance with HIPAA requirements.

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The First Ever HIPAA Audit: Where’s The Report? Does It Have Beef?

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Gosh, I just had a flashback to the “Where’s the Beef” commercial from years ago… 🙂
The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule went into effect in April, 2001, and gave covered entities (CEs) two years to get into compliance. The HIPAA Security Rule went into effect in April 2003 and CEs had until April 2005 to get into compliance.

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HIPAA & 4 Lessons From an Insider Threat Example: Former Healthcare IT Manager Hacks Into System and Deletes PHI

Monday, September 10th, 2007

There are so many ways in which bad things can happen with the authorized access personnel and business partners have to sensitive data, personally identifiable information (PII), and business systems. Many times the bad things that happen are a result of a lack of awareness of how to properly protect information, a result of mistakes, or a result of malicious intent. Here is just one more example to add to your file of actual insider threat incidents.

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