I am sure many of you remember the reports dating back to 2005 that celebrity patient files were being viewed by casual lookers…employees who had access to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Health System electronic medical record (EMR) but who had no legitimate reason to view those records. Well, the Department of [...]
I am not sure why I continue to attend free webinars about data breaches. They mostly serve to make me extremely anxious for our customers. . . especially for those who have not created a data security plan or have thought minimally about their responsibilities for protecting the privacy of their patients’ Protected Health Information [...]
In the past year, the Office for Civil Rights, the federal office responsible for enforcing HIPAA privacy requirements, has finalized the rule by which all covered entities and their business associates are required to protect the personal and health information of patients they serve. The rule details the actions a breach of the privacy rule [...]
I am sure some of you remember that the HITECH portion of the stimulus bill (ARRA) included attempts to strengthen the protection of psychotherapy notes in the new Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). In fact, the Secretary of HHS was instructed by Congress to study whether the protections for psychotherapy notes granted by HIPAA should be extended [...]
This week one of our customers experienced a “happy ending” to a very unhappy story. We thought we would share it with you. They were sure they had a good backup. When their server hard drive crashed, they were distressed but not terrified. Instead of dealing with the loss of all their data, it merely meant [...]
Almost two months passed between my post last week and the last one before that. The combination of family illnesses followed by vacation and recovery from travel put me in a position of being so far behind in the reading I usually do that I could not possibly catch up. My personal inclination was to [...]
Consider a couple of nightmares that might easily come true: 1. Your laptop, with a variety of documents and files containing confidential, protected health information on its hard drive, is stolen from your car, hotel, or disappears while you are traveling. 2. Your office is burglarized and all the desktop computers, as well as a [...]
