HIPAA news and information

Who's still stumping for a national patient identifier? “I want an identifier,” said Joey Sudomir, CIO at Texas Health Partners, Arlington, and Bill Spooner is right there with him.
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Some healthcare CIOs hope to create a platform for dialogue and to create consensus around two sensitive privacy issues—patient record identification and consent management.
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HIPAA makes it hard for organizations to obtain personal health information and even harder to use that information for the purpose of data analysis. Empowering patients to own and share their own data—and then assuring them that it's being properly de-identified—can ease this process.
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Safeguarding patients' personal health information has become a more complicated job—and potentially more punitive—thanks to a raft of new federal rules going into effect this week.
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Data breaches threaten healthcare organizations from all angles—from hackers, thieves and forgetful employees—and touch all facets of IT infrastructure. Updated HIPAA rules make organizations responsible for the actions of their business associates, too. Healthcare IT security is a...
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In the run-up to the Sept. 23 enforcement date for a host of revisions to federal health information privacy laws, one group—clinical laboratories—will get something of a respite, and another—pharmaceutical manufacturers—some regulatory relief.
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Federal health information technology policymakers, aided by a number of healthcare IT organizations, will take another stab at achieving industry consensus on how to best match patients to their electronic health records to improve patient safety and care coordination. The goal is to make sure...
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It's the little things that add up. Like the minutes it takes annually to deal with each patient's HIPAA notice of privacy practices for protected healthcare information. Annually, that task eats up about 30.7 million hours of healthcare workers' and...
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One warm night in mid-July, more than 4 million patient records breezed out the door of the Advocate Medical Group administrative office in the arms of an unidentified thief who stole four computers from the largest medical group in Illinois. The 1,100-physician medical group based in Park Ridge is...
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The recent massive data breach at Advocate Health Care has already had legal consequences. Downers Grove, Ill.-based Advocate and a subsidiary, Advocate Medical Group, are facing a state class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of two named plaintiffs and 4 million individuals whose personally...
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