Privacy Series: HIPAA Breaches - When It Is, and When It Is Not a Breach
Compliance Perspective: What's New in Healthcare Privacy
‘Tis the season for holiday baking and the elves at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), have been diligently crafting their own holiday treat. On December 27,...more
On July 19, Change Healthcare Ince. filed a breach report with HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concerning its mammoth ransomware attack and breach. The organization’s breach report to OCR identifies just 500 individuals as...more
Over the course of the past few months, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), both of which are divisions of the U.S. Department of Health and...more
In March of this year, The Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services issued a letter addressing the recent cybersecurity incident impacting many health care entities, primarily Change Healthcare,...more
If the penultimate enforcement settlement of 2023 issued by the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sounds familiar, that’s with good reason. And the last one of the year should ring some bells, too....more
On October 31, 2023, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a press release announcing that it has settled with Doctors’ Management Services for $100,000 following a ransomware attack that compromised the protected health...more
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently submitted two annual reports to Congress setting forth a summary of complaints and breaches reported to the OCR during...more
On February 1, 2023, the FTC announced a proposed $1.5 million settlement with GoodRx Holdings, based on alleged violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”) and Health Breach Notification Rule (“HBNR”) for...more
General and specialty compliance training from the comfort of your home or office! HCCA’s Regional Healthcare Compliance Conferences provide practitioners with virtual compliance training that includes updates on the...more
HIPAA-covered entities should note the quickly approaching March 1, 2022 deadline for reporting breaches of unsecured protected health information that occurred in 2021 and involved fewer than 500 individuals. This article...more
Health insurer Anthem, Inc. has finally reached a settlement with a coalition of 41 states plus the District of Columbia, and a separate settlement with California, to resolve state attorney general investigations of a data...more
Health care organizations continue to be a popular target for hackers. According to information from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), over 30 reports of data breaches have been filed by health care...more
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that it has fined the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (TXHHS) $1.6 million for HIPAA violations. This is one of the few fines the OCR has levied against a state agency....more
Cyberliability insurance provider Beazley Insurance Company has analyzed its internal breach response data and determined that in its experience, there has been a thirty-seven percent (37%) increase in ransomware attacks this...more
In accordance with the Inflation Adjustment Act, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has updated its regulations to reflect required annual inflation-related increases to civil monetary penalties, including...more
Health care providers operate in one of the most highly regulated industries in terms of compliance and governmental oversight. As a result, providers face a number of regulatory and compliance challenges each year....more
Regulators, industry experts, and researchers provided insight into health privacy and security enforcement trends, emerging threats, and new tools at a recent conference focused on the Health Insurance Portability and...more
UNITED STATES - Regulatory—Policy, Best Practices, and Standards - NIST Produces Roadmap for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Version 1.1 - On April 25, the National Institute of Standards and Technology...more
Medical Informatics Engineering, Inc. and its wholly-owned subsidiaries (MIE) and the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS-OCR) entered into a $100,000 settlement and two-year...more
On May 6, 2019, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that Touchstone Medical Imaging will pay $3 million to settle potential HIPAA violations associated with a breach that exposed more than 300,000...more
According to a February 12, 2019 Press Release from Protenus, a developer of analytics for patient privacy monitoring and compliance, 15,085,302 patient records were breached in 2018 – a startling number made even more...more
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates that U.S. health care systems lost around $6.2 billion in 2016 due to data breaches. Congress and HHS have recently taken affirmative steps towards reducing that...more
So you just discovered that protected health information (“PHI”) from your organization was improperly accessed or disclosed. Are you required to self-report the violation to the affected individual and HHS? HIPAA Breach...more
Just before the new year, the Department of Health and Human Resources (HHS) released voluntary cybersecurity practices for health care organizations, which consists of a main document, two technical volumes, and resources...more
Another government settlement demonstrates that not having a HIPAA compliance program can be costly. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)'s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced, on Dec. 4, 2018, that Advanced...more