HIPAA: The New Security Rule and HITECH Act

DHHS just released a guidance on how to protect HIPAA privacy during emergency situations, such as an EBOLA outbreak. http://tinyurl.com/oey67nf

Envision Inc's Healthcare Blog

A hospital in Michigan accidentally posts the medical records of thousands of patients on the internet. A health insurer loses the financial, health and personal information of 450,000 customers, and fails to notify them for six months. And two of the largest pharmacy chains in the U.S. are found discarding patient records and other legally-protected information in unsecured dumpsters.

This unnecessary exposure of private information should be alarming. In fact, since the creation of the HIPAA act, the Department of Health and Human Services has investigated approximately 8,000 legitimate complaints of privacy violations. These statistics are simply unacceptable.

As professionals who work in healthcare, how we protect personal health information is just as much a part of our jobs as the care we deliver.  At stake is not only the privacy of an individual’s care, but the security of personal information, which could be used for medical identity theft, and other…

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