Last week, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced the launch of phase 2 of the HIPAA Audit Program. OCR’s goal is to proactively uncover and address risks and vulnerabilities to protected health information (PHI). Effective immediately, OCR will ensure Covered Entities (CEs), their Business Associates (BAs) and vendors have comprehensive risk management frameworks…
If you work in or manage a hospital, group of hospitals, business associate or just about any other healthcare enterprise, you know your challenges include a rapidly changing payer landscape, fierce completion, and stressed out, overworked employees. If only that were the end of it! Today, your most vexing challenge might be coping with ever-increasing,…
As per the 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) released by Verizon there has been a considerable drop in the number of compromised records- from 361 million in 2008 to 144 million in 2009 and less than 4 million in 2010. Security breach incidents have reduced to 1% in the healthcare sector while the hospitality…
The media is abuzz with news of data breaches especially with websites like the Health and Human Services (HHS) tracking them. As per the Office of Civil Rights, there were close to 9,109 data breaches by Sept 2010, averaging 25 data breaches per day! The HSS had earlier issued a given set of regulations to…
While Cignet is recovering from the shock of $4.3 million fine slapped on it for HIPAA violation, barely two days later, the General Hospital Corporation and Massachusetts General Physicians Organization Inc. or better known as the Mass General gets hit with a fine of $1 million penalty for blatant exposure of patients’ records in a…
The present IT environment is complex in nature, and much more than a handful of technical people operating and controlling systems with a few virus prevention tools. The complexity has increased manifold with a growing number of security threats being identified everyday. The security of confidential data is under question with potential risks from malicious…
