Officials with the HHS Office for Civil Rights shed some light on a number of security-related topics at a conference the office co-sponsored May 11-12 in the nation's capital. For example, Susan McAndrew, OCR's deputy director for privacy, revealed that the random HIPAA compliance audits called for under the HITECH...
All healthcare organizations should create a detailed plan for meeting the requirements of the HITECH breach notification rule, says attorney Gerry Hinkley.
In an interview, Hinkley describes key steps hospitals, clinics and other should take, including:
Designating someone, such as the HIPAA privacy officer, to...
The government's Medicare anti-fraud efforts resulted in the recovery of $2.51 billion in fiscal 2009, up 29 percent from the previous year, according to a new report.
A review of news from this week's conference, "Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance through HIPAA Security," sponsored by the HHS Office for Civil Rights and NIST, including:
Healthcare organizations developing or updating information technology contingency plans for responding to emergencies, such as natural disasters, soon can take advantage of new guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Although the list of major healthcare breaches reported to federal authorities so far does not yet include a large-scale hacking incident, organizations should nevertheless take preventive measures to avoid such attacks, a federal privacy expert says.
The best way to persuade physicians to take information security seriously is to explain the business risks involved, says Robert Tennant, senior policy analyst with the Medical Group Management Association, the trade group for physician group practice administrators.
The New Mexico Human Services Department is notifying about 9,600 Medicaid enrollees about a breach stemming from the theft of car with an unencrypted laptop in its trunk.
In discussing Colorado's foray into cloud computing, Colorado Chief Information Security Officer Seth Kulakow discusses the demands the cloud presents governments and offers advice for IT security professionals on building their careers.
Whitehouse Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt used wit to share his wisdom about healthcare information security in a rambling, folksy keynote address this week. He stressed that healthcare organizations of all sizes need to take security more seriously.
The new federal HIPAA privacy and security rule compliance audits of healthcare organizations and their business associates likely will start later this year once a report on a model for the program is completed, a key federal privacy official says.
Social media "are a data security person's worst nightmare," says Sharon Finney, corporate data security officer at Adventist Health System. So Finney and her team spent more than six months crafting security policies for limited use of the new media.
A critical first step down the path toward HITECH Act compliance is conducting a thorough risk assessment, an official with the agency enforcing compliance says.
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