Over the past thirty days, the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) has reached three HIPAA breach resolutions, signaling to organizations that are covered entities and business associates under HIPAA, the importance of instituting basic best practices for data breach prevention and response.
On November 26th, the OCR announced a settlement with Allergy Associations
October 2018 marks the 15th annual National Cyber Security Awareness Month. In honor of this occasion, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have jointly launched an updated HIPAA Security Risk Assessment (SRA) Tool to help covered entities and business associates
The New Jersey State Bar Association recently met to discuss, among other things, our favorite topic: Cybersecurity. (Perhaps our esteemed Privacy, e-Communication and Data Security Practice Group chair was there….) We wanted to briefly mention two critical points discussed:
The pace of innovation in healthcare today has produced an amazing increase in the number of available mobile apps for health-related information. More than 300,000 healthcare apps are available online. These apps are developed and designed to fit within the “connected health model” which attempts to provide flexible and efficient healthcare services by using connected
Health insurance carriers often provide explanation of benefits (EOB) summaries to the policyholder specifying the type and cost of health care services received by dependents covered by the policy. EOBs often disclose sensitive information regarding the mental or physical health condition of adult dependents. Massachusetts has now enacted a law, an act to protect access
Last week, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal and the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs (“Division”) announced that a physician group affiliated with more than 50 South Jersey medical and surgical practices agreed to pay $417,816 and improve data security practices to settle allegations it failed to properly protect the privacy of more
Nary a week goes by without news of a data breach by a healthcare provider…while there are certainly a good number of breaches resulting from a breach of cybersecurity defenses or from the wrongful exploitation of system security weaknesses, there is still a risk to healthcare providers resulting from the internal operations of the healthcare
This Sunday, January 28, is Data Privacy Day, which Congress recognized on Jan. 27, 2014, when it adopted S. Res. 337, supporting the designation. As noted by the National Cyber Security Alliance, Data Privacy Day began in the United States and Canada in January 2008, an extension of the Data Protection Day celebration
Physician practices and other health care providers respond to numerous requests for confidential patient information from patients and others. Mistakes made by employees fulfilling such requests for medical records or making similar disclosures can expose the practice to civil litigation. A recent decision by the Connecticut Supreme Court (Byrne v. Avery Center for Obstetrics
In Minnesota, 97% of the 25,226 allegations of elder abuse (neglect, physical abuse, unexplained serious injuries and thefts) in state-licensed senior facilities in 2016 were never investigated. This prompted Minnesota Governor, Mark Dayton, to announce plans last week to form a task force to find out why. As one might expect, Minnesota is not alone.