What is HIPAA?
What is HIPAA? HIPPA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996) This is a Federal Statute to improve national standards for electronic health care transactions, unique health identifiers, and security. Congress recognized that advances...
Be Careful-HIPAA Has Teeth
Last week we reviewed all the civil and criminal penalties associated with HIPAA violations/breaches. We promised to tell you, this week, about the few cases that involved jail time. These violations were from people who weren't careful. Violations of HIPAA that are...
Failing to Comply with HIPAA can Lead to Damaging Penalties
Failing to Comply with HIPAA can Lead to Damaging Penalties: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for enforcing the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. OCR enforces the Privacy and Security Rules in several...
Informative Guidelines to Follow
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is responsible for enforcement of the HIPAA law. These enforcements aren't all just "guidelines" however. OCR began enforcement efforts in earnest in 2011. Since then, the amount of...
What is the most common cause of HIPAA breaches?
While interesting and unusual HIPAA breaches happen, the most common HIPAA breaches in healthcare are still old fashion human error. Since 2004, the Number One cause of breaches has been impermissible uses and disclosures. This can be anything from an email sent...
Security Threats: Just when you thought it was safe…
On October 17, 2017 First Health of the Carolina’s shut down their systems to ensure that all devices were tested and cleared of the threat of a new strain of the Wannacry virus. While the organization indicated that no patient information was compromised, the...
What the Presence Breach Tells Us About Delayed Reporting
According to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Health and Human Services, January 2017 continued high numbers of data breaches. While not as high as the average monthly breaches in 2016, which was 37.5, it was close with January 2017 showing 31...
Have a Small Practice? You Still Need to Worry about HIPAA!
Providers in small office practices often think they don't need to worry about HIPAA investigations because they’re simply too small for the government to consider. However, this simply is not true and can get them into a lot of trouble. OCR (the Office of Civil...
Time to Strengthen your BA Agreements
So far this year, 22 breaches have been reported for 2017. Of course, there are still 2016 breaches being report to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website. While all the 2017 breaches so far are small, the largest one provides some good learnings on...
2017 – The Year of the Healthcare Hack?
Released for its third year, the Experian Data Breach Resolution Report for 2016 predicts that the healthcare sector will continue to be a focal point for cyber attacks in 2017. Why is the healthcare industry continuously targeted? The simple answer is that medical...
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