Digital Planning Podcast - Interview With Leeza Garber
Compliance into the Weeds-Episode 39, Disclosure of Ransomware Attacks
Your Cyber Minute: Compliance with the Proposed NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation
Safeguards against Data Security Breaches (Part One)
New Jersey Acting AG Andrew Bruck reached a settlement with healthcare provider Diamond Institute for Infertility and Menopause, LLC (“Diamond”) to resolve allegations stemming from a 2016 data breach that compromised the...more
NFTs – or non-fungible tokens – are increasingly popular among artists, sports figures, and the video game industry. But NFTs (some selling for upwards of eight figures) are not just for gamers, Mark Cuban, and the ultra...more
On February 24, 2021, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“OCR”) announced that it will not impose penalties against covered entities or their business associates that use online...more
On January 19, 2021, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a Notice of Enforcement Discretion (Notice) announcing that it will not impose penalties for...more
U.S. hospitals, already on the front lines of fighting the coronavirus pandemic, are now facing viral attacks by cybercriminals. More than 20 U.S. hospitals and health care organizations have reported their data being held...more
In this week’s episode, Rebecca Schaefer and Hannah Maroney discuss a string of recent HIPAA enforcement actions which demonstrate that the HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the agency tasked with enforcing HIPAA, is...more
Report on Medicare Compliance 29, no. 28 (August 3, 2020) - The 2017 theft of an unencrypted laptop is at the heart of a new HIPAA settlement with Lifespan Health System Affiliated Covered Entity (Lifespan ACE) in Rhode...more
Report on Patient Privacy 20, no. 1 (January 2020) - In the waning days of 2019, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) didn’t halt the HIPAA enforcement momentum it had built up during the last quarter of the year, dinging...more
SDNY Rejects Standing under “Increased Risk” Theory Where Data Not Targeted or Stolen - The Southern District of New York rejected a settlement that would have resolved a class action based on the unauthorized (and...more
The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) entered into a $3 million no-fault settlement agreement and two year corrective...more
A large New York hospital system learned this lesson the expensive way. According to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) press release issued earlier this week, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigated...more
Twelve state attorneys general have brought suit against two medical Information Technology companies. The AGs allege that the companies, Medical Informatics Engineering Inc. and its subsidiary, NoMoreClipboard LLC, had poor...more
Healthcare organizations take note: not following your own data security rules can be costly, very costly. And the more time it takes to comply, the faster the fines stack up....more
CMS issued a memo to state survey agency directors on December 28, 2017, to clarify CMS’s position on texting patient information. The memo, which indicates that it is effective “immediately,” states that CMS prohibits...more
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced yet another HIPAA privacy and security settlement involving Protected Health Information (PHI) on a stolen laptop. Although this might be seen as just...more
Last week, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued guidance on securing end-to-end communications for sensitive information transmitted between parties over the internet. The OCR warns against “man-in-the-middle” (MITM)...more
Last week, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) published a monetary penalty notice which fined a private healthcare company, HCA International, £200,000 for its failure to keep sensitive data secure....more
The use of cloud service providers has exploded in the past several years. According to estimates from Gartner, the market for cloud services is expected to reach $204 billion in 2016. But the use of cloud service providers...more
Cloud service providers that process electronic protected health information (ePHI) are business associates under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), even if the PHI is encrypted and the...more
In the two decades since its original passage, complying with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) hasn’t gotten any easier. Enacted with the primary goal of protecting the confidentiality,...more
Premier Healthcare, a multi-specialty group located in Bloomington, Illinois, announced in early March that an unencrypted laptop has been missing from its billing department since early January and started notifying affected...more
With headlines every day announcing another release of Protected Health Information (PHI), providers are asking themselves – is there a way to protect against these breaches? Beyond improving the security of large...more
Recent, large-scale breaches of health information have served to highlight the fact that federal agencies have only rarely assessed penalties against companies as a result of these breaches, while many states do not have...more
In the wake of recent breaches of personally identifiable information (PII) suffered by health insurance companies located in their states, the New Jersey Legislature passed, and the Connecticut General Assembly will consider...more
The Massachusetts Attorney General announced Friday that her office had reached a settlement with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) surrounding a 2012 data breach in which a physician’s unencrypted personal laptop...more