HIPAA Security Conference Slated

Compliance Audits, Breach Investigations to be Addressed Howard Anderson (ismg_editor) • May 14, 2012

A wide range of healthcare security and privacy issues, including HIPAA compliance audits and information breaches, will be discussed at a June 6-7 conference in Washington. Co-sponsors are the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights.

The fifth annual event, "Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance Through HIPAA Security," also will be available via webcast.

Although the focus of the conference is strategies for compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's Security Rule, the event will tackle a wide variety topics, including:

Updates on OCR's ongoing HIPAA compliance audit program as well as its breach investigations;
Using NIST's HIPAA Security Rule Toolkit to help with risk assessments;
Cloud computing and mobile device security issues;
The convergence of privacy and security issues.

Howard Schmidt, the nation's cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to the president, is an invited keynoter. Other speakers include Leon Rodriguez, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, and Joy Pritts, chief privacy officer at the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

More information is available on the NIST website.

Health Data Initiative

Meanwhile, the Health Data Initiative, a joint effort of HHS and the Institute of Medicine, will hold its third annual gorum June 5-6 in Washington. The focus of this event is the innovative application of data to improve healthcare.

Among the speakers at this event will be HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Farzad Mostashari, who heads the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

More information is available on the event's website.