Yet another breach incident puts health information of 168,500 individuals at risk. According to a public notice, Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, a third-party billing vendor reported theft of several unencrypted company computers on 5th of February. The computers were stolen from the Los Angeles County public health and health services departments. Following this report, breach notification…
While the meaningful use incentive program is intended to encourage healthcare providers to adopt electronic health record systems and to ensure secure data sharing practices, it looks like some providers may have found loopholes to obtaining incentives without actually fulfilling requirements. Shelby Regional Medical Centre in Texas has come under the scanner for making false…
In the keynote presentation at the HIMSS Privacy and Security Forum in Boston on 23rd September, the Director of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Leon Rodriguez addressed the areas of focus for the HIPAA enforcement actions to be undertaken by OCR, and gave specific perspective advice for organizations that are under the purview of…
Did you know that 2.7 million Americans were affected from around 32 major health information breach incidents recently? The bulk of the people were affected by the information breach that occurred with the Insurer Health Net and its business associate IBM. The Federal list released on June 22nd lists all the major healthcare information breaches…
As per the 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) released by Verizon there has been a considerable drop in the number of compromised records- from 361 million in 2008 to 144 million in 2009 and less than 4 million in 2010. Security breach incidents have reduced to 1% in the healthcare sector while the hospitality…
A recent federal list announced that there have been serious health information breaches that affected nearly 8.3 million people since September 2009. With 3 government agencies looking into Heath Net breaches including the case of 9 missing server drives from a California data center that was managed by IBM, the actual gravity of the situation…
While Cignet is recovering from the shock of $4.3 million fine slapped on it for HIPAA violation, barely two days later, the General Hospital Corporation and Massachusetts General Physicians Organization Inc. or better known as the Mass General gets hit with a fine of $1 million penalty for blatant exposure of patients’ records in a…
A recent incident of HIPAA violation has reinforced the need for health care organizations to focus on creating and keeping the records efficiently for easy access; most do not create the records in the first place! If they have not, the tendency has been to subdue their responsibilities towards enforcement of security compliance measures with…
It is a strangely paradoxical situation that despite revised and stricter compliance regulations the number of security breaches seems to rise. The HIPAA mandate was enforced to tone down risks threatening patients’ personal records. But there has hardly been any positive report of effective progress towards a threat free environment. As per a recent study…
In 2005, when HIPAA Compliant came into effect, healthcare organizations were required to mitigate risks by conducting periodic risk assessment. But until recently a significant number of healthcare entities did not put this into practice. According to a recent survey 14 percent of hospitals and 33 percent of clinics were yet to conduct their first…
