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 [...]
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 [...]
One of our customers recently shared a NY Times column about photos you post on the web revealing where they were taken. Geotags provided by some digital cameras and many smartphones with built-in GPS features indicate where the photo was taken. If you post a photo of your child’s at-home birthday party taken with geotags turned ‘on’ [...]
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 [...]
Most every week I have a call from my credit card company’s security department to see if the recent activity on our account is actually ours. We used to get these calls maybe a couple of times a year, but now it is literally weekly. A while back our credit card processor for SOS transactions [...]
New guidance about communicating with a patient’s family, friends or caretakers was released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights. This is the office entrusted with education about and enforcement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. They have created two documents which [...]
