For years – since HIPAA privacy rules were finalized actually – I’ve had my nemesis. I’ve never met her. Never heard her speak in a public forum. But everything I have read about that included a quote from her about the state of healthcare privacy laws in this country has led me to believe she [...]

As the use of the internet increasingly becomes a community blackboard, how does that affect the risk of privacy violations for provider’s patients? What are implications when a hospital employee has their picture taken with a patient and posts it on their Facebook? People are talking about patients they cared for on a [...]

I struggled for a week trying to come up with a topic for this week. Driving home last night from a Cub Scout meeting it came to me… a Top 10 to get us into 2010! Now, what stories in healthcare IT? Surely ARRA and HITECH. And defining and refining “meaningful use.” What about the [...]

Our government continues to march toward more modifying how HIPAA addresses the electronic transactions by which payors and providers conduct financial business. On November 7, 2009 the house passed a bill that should help make the transaction sets more uniform.
The key word – uniform! Isn’t that what the original intent of the transactions and [...]

Just in time for Halloween, the Department of Health and Human Services released an interim rule that helps HIPAA grow some fangs for enforcing violations. While the privacy advocates continue to say HIPAA doesn’t go far enough, at least this is a step in the right direction.
Georgina Verdugo, director of the HHS Office for [...]

Nearly 20 percent of Medicaid managed care plan provider CalOptima members learned this week that personal health information, including demographic and medical procedure codes, has gone missing. The copies of the information were stored on an unidentified type of electronic media and sent via the United States Postal Service by a claims scanning vendor. According [...]

I read stories about IT-related incidents which happen all over the world, and each time I see that there is a tremendous amount of practical knowledge which can be gained from other people’s mistakes, disasters, etc. This report comes from the “some people never learn” department, where we heard about the largest bank in [...]

We see on June 24th that Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, had to notify approximately 45,000 current and former staff members, students and their family members that a stolen laptop computer contained their unencrypted personal information. (I’ll bet that was a fun task!) The lost/stolen data included both names and social security [...]

Two events in healthcare information privacy caught my eye this week. First, Kaiser Bellflower in Los Angeles was fined by California Department of Health for privacy violations involving Nadya Suleman (aka Octomom). The other (HHS adding to the agency enforcement team), while it may appear to be minor and unrelated, should cause healthcare providers to [...]

News comes to us that earlier this month three people in the US have been indicted and five people in Italy have been arrested in connection with an international phone service hacking scheme. The group allegedly broke into IT systems at more than 2,500 companies around the world and stole codes used to route [...]