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Hospital CIOs, chief information security officers, and privacy officers are working diligently to keep their names off that wall. But they are dealing with a regulatory environment that is still in flux. A final rule that will strengthen HIPAA privacy and security safeguards is due out before the end of the year. HHS also has proposed a rule for the accounting of disclosures from electronic records. The biggest shift under way may be a new enforcement regime as the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) shifts gears from only reacting to data breach reports to begin random audits of the privacy and security safeguards of large and small providers and their business associates. Another new wrinkle under the HITECH Act is that state attorneys general can file civil lawsuits for HIPAA violations.

OCR audit healthcare Risk

While 51% of the comments were posted to blogs and 30% to message boards, just 7% appeared on Facebook and 7% on Twitter.

healthcare social media

Do you know where your electronic health information is tonight?

Here's a reader challenge: I'll pay $10 to the first adult who has had at least five encounters with the private-sector healthcare system in the past 10 years to come up with a complete map of where all his or her electronic health records have traveled, who has seen them and where they are now.

healthcare records

Doctors at several companies said that they had never been pressured to downplay illnesses or withhold treatments, and that they follow federal privacy laws protecting the release of patient information.

on-site healthcare

David Cade, deputy general counsel at HHS, had some friendly advice for the lawyers attending the in-house counsel sessions the day before the official opening of the American Health Lawyers Association's annual meeting in Boston.

One tip was to submit comments when the department revisits a provision of the healthcare reform law making compliance programs mandatory. A second was to get serious about cyber-security.

HHS tips compliance data security healthcare

Cutting costs in a hospital system does not have to mean rationing care if executives embrace changes in system design, Maureen Bisognano said in her keynote address kicking off the Healthcare Financial Management Association's annual conference.
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change healthcare business

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A federal judge ruled Friday that the state of Indiana is not allowed to cut off most of Planned Parenthood's state and federal public funding solely because the organization also provides abortions."

healthcare news

Search giant Google has announced it will pull the plug on its Google Health personal health-record platform by year's end, giving the once-heralded flagship of the “Health 2.0” movement a lifespan of less than four years.

google healthcare pull plug

A new study from IBM shows that consumers have a growing appetite for health and wellness gadgets – representing a market opportunity for device manufacturers that has "barely been tapped."

healthcare gadgets IBM

"Healthcare reform, meaningful use,
interoperability, and privacy and security are hot topics among attendees at the
annual CHIME and HIMSS conferences in Orlando this week, of course. But this
year there seems to be an increased emphasis on secure and accurate exchange of
healthcare data—whether among members of local or regional cooperatives, private
for- and non-profit exchanges, state-run HIEs, or individual systems that just
want the hospitals, clinics, specialists, and primary care physicians in their
network to do a better job of communicating electronically (and no, faxing
doesn't count)."

DataExchange Privacy healthcare himss

"Some of the earliest reactions by healthcare organizations to last week's release of nearly 700 pages of federal rules related to the health information technology provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 can be characterized as decidedly mixed.

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healthcare meaningful reaction

"The Senate healthcare legislation passed last week aims to reshape the U.S. healthcare system and the way hospitals, insurers and physicians do business"

healthcare Senate

"In response to Joseph Conn's "Facebook privacy revisions ‘sign post' for healthcare":

Just read your article. I wanted to point out that although Facebook is by far the personal social networking behemoth, Plaxo has long implemented the granularity you speak of in the article. Plaxo started primarily as a business networking tool allowing users to keep their contacts up-to-date. Joseph Smarr, the chief technology officer, is one of the thought leaders in the open social Web movement; you should check out the bill of rights posted there—it's 2 years old and was co-written by Smarr and embraced by many of the early social media concerns.

The rules are:

"We publicly assert that all users of the social Web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

Ownership of their personal information, including their profile data, the list of people they are connected to and the activity stream of content they create.

Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others.

Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites."

Should healthcare informatics and business leaders embrace such a vision, I believe it would go a long way toward addressing the problems we have in our industry. For example, Plaxo internalizes the bill of rights by allowing users to segregate their connections as family, personal, business and public. Visibility of groups of information can be controlled at that level."

Privacy healthcare Plaxo Facebook

Patients’ advocates claimed victory in a battle over the privacy of health records as the U.S. Congress approved the economic stimulus bill, which contains $19 billion for health-care information.

U.S. House and Senate negotiators’ compromise reflects stricter standards that privacy advocates wanted for marketing, selling and disclosing health data. Both houses approved the $787 billion stimulus plan today and sent it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The legislation contains $2 billion in grants to create a national system of computerized health records and $17 billion in higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for doctors and hospitals to adopt the technology. Electronic records will improve care and reduce costs, Obama said. The legislation also will boost the health-records industry, led by Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions Inc., Quality Systems Inc. and Athenahealth Inc.

“We’ve dramatically improved on the status-quo, wholly unregulated system where private patient data was bought and sold like any commodity,” Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, said in an interview today.

Privacy Stimulus Congress Obama Patient Data ACLU electronic healthcare records

Privacy and civil liberties advocates are urging lawmakers working on the forthcoming economic stimulus package to ensure that any language to spur adoption of electronic medical records includes meaningful security safeguards.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Consumer Action, the National Association of Social Workers, Patient Privacy Rights and others sent letters to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President-elect Barack Obama Wednesday asking them to ensure individuals can control the use of their medical records and protect them from what they believe is a thriving industry of firms that share and sell medical data.

"We all want to innovate and improve health care, but without privacy our system will crash as any system with a persistent and chronic virus will," Patient Privacy Rights executive director Ashley Katz said at a Capitol Hill briefing.

Katz said her group has been pleased with progress that the House Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means committees made last year.

Privacy HealthCare Medical Records Data

LESLIE: The most commonly discussed identity theft cases involve credit cards and bank accounts, but today identity theft also includes obtaining medical care by using a stolen identity. The result can be devastating for a victim of this crime. The victim may be held responsible for paying the fraudulent bills and can be burdened with erroneous health information that is difficult to expunge from official records. Obtaining health and life insurance may become complicated or impossible because an electronic or paper health record may have been created reflecting a life threatening disease that the victim does not have. And more common, health care coverage is denied because the victim has reached his or her insurance benefit cap.

PATTY: It seems that medical identity theft is on the rise. Several of our HIM colleagues have had to address this issue within their organization. HIM professionals, working with IT, finance, legal, etc., can help set policies and procedures to minimize and manage this issue within their organization. So we are on the same page Leslie, what is medical identity theft?

LESLIE: When we think about medical identity theft, we need to think of it as a subset of health care fraud. We also need to acknowledge that it includes two components: medical and financial.

Medical identity theft typically involves records of a thief becoming intermingled with records of an innocent victim. Thus, a victim's medical record could reflect a surgical procedure, medical diagnosis or health history that belongs to the thief. You can see how this might affect accurate treatment of the victim in the future and the insurance nightmares that could result.

PATTY: Nightmare is an understatement! In preparing for our discussion today I searched the Internet for some recent examples of medical identity theft. I couldn't believe what I found! Here are three examples that capture the flavor of this crime:

A 56-year-old retired Florida schoolteacher was billed for the amputation of her right foot. To deal with bill

Privacy Medical Identity Theft Identity HealthCare

Managing a breach of medical data in the healthcare industry can be a complex process due to the highly sensitive personal information of the affected population. It can be even more complex if that population consisted of multiple categories that all need to be addressed in different ways. In this podcast, Christine Arevalo, director of critical incident response for ID Experts, discusses the processes used in successfully managing such a breach.

Privacy Data Breach Healthcare