It should be an outrageous number—80,000 breaches—but crazy as it seems, that huge number might be a sign of progress.
I interviewed a group of health IT security specialists last week for a story we published about breaches and encryption.
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What am I thankful for today?
The usual stuff. A loving family. My faith and my church home. Good health. An interesting job where I can put my skills to good use.
And—as a professional skeptic, this is weird for me to say—I'm also grateful for our government, or at least some aspects of it.
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I want to say something quickly about outsourcing mobile app development.
At the Health 2.0 conference this week in San Francisco, HHS and the Advisory Board Co. announced the winners of their competitions for apps using the Blue Button technology developed by the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department.
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A million and a half dollars here, a million and a half dollars there, and pretty soon, you're talking real money—even in the healthcare industry.
The Office for Civil Rights at HHS on Monday announced a settlement agreement for $1.5 million with a venerable Massachusetts healthcare organization, Boston-based Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and its affiliated medical group, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Associates, over alleged HIPAA security-rule violations. They involve the reported theft of an unencrypted laptop bearing the records of 3,621 individual patients back in 2010.
I did a quick check of the OCR's "wall of shame" website and found MEEI was getting whacked on its second trip to the rodeo.
The privacy and security enforcers at the OCR, after a long, long period of quiescence, appear to be stepping up their enforcement efforts and availing themselves of the stiffer penalties that Congress provided in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's revisions to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's privacy and security rules.
And while the OCR is allowing MEEI to pay the fine on the installment plan, even $500,000 a year is a lot of money—a point not lost on MEEI itself.
In a statement, MEEI said that because no one appears to have been harmed, it was "disappointed with the size of the fine, especially since the independent specialty hospital's annual revenue is very small compared to other much larger institutions that have received smaller fines."
I'll bet.
But it's hard to know what the government was supposed to do other than to take out its proverbial 2x4 and start whacking to get the healthcare industry's attention.
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I was in our archives last week, doing research on the nationwide conversion to ASC X12 Version 5010 administrative claims standards, when I pulled up a story I had written late last summer about the status of 5010.
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We reported recently on a memo issued by President Barack Obama last week to all federal agency and department heads requiring them to come up with at least two mobile device applications using government data.
Stories about the memo, widening the use of the Veteran's Affairs Department Blue Button patient download technology, and a new national mobile technology strategy appear here and, with some industry IT mavens' reactions, here.
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