Category: Security

Utter the acronym HIPAA to people in the medical profession and you will get a variety of facial responses, none of which have been, in my experience, a smile of contentment. Indeed, HIPAA’s privacy and security rules are often grumbled about as being burdensome and restrictive. The rules are increasingly criticized as ineffective these days…

This perspective paper helps organizations understand why de-identification of protected health information (PHI) is important. Covered entities and their business associates currently face the challenge of realizing value from healthcare data while protecting patient privacy. De-identification can provide a way to satisfy both needs without the need for a Data Use Agreement (DUA). By Dan…

In June of this year, Privacy Analytics completed a survey of healthcare analysts, researchers and privacy professionals on best practices associated with anonymizing data for secondary purposes. The survey results pointed to common management approaches among leading practitioners to govern and anonymize data in their enterprise. Additionally, the results pointed to an anonymization maturity model…

Privacy breaches have been escalating in the healthcare industry at an alarming rate. last year alone, more than seven million patient health records were breached. industry experts estimate the annual cost of those breaches to be over $5.6 billion. …read more    

For over 65 years, MHG has been dedicated to providing a wide range of health and wellness services to their community. With more than 1,000 employees consisting of physicians, care providers, nurses and part-time staff; MHG needed a fast and HIPAA compliant way to comm- unicate. Nurses were relying on paging and their answering service…

With an entire network of medical offices, physicians, care providers, and nurses, NAMM California was experiencing significant communication delays, particularly between their hospitalists, case managers, medical directors and nurses. Staff was using basic SMS to text colleagues with patient updates and instructions, but knew they tried to be discrete as possible when discussing patients as…

Federal regulations, mobility, and security present challenges to healthcare companies which require secure support from IT professionals. By Scott Braynard, VP of Public Sector, Bomgar …read more    

As a professional in the healthcare industry, your patients’ privacy and security is always a top priority, especially in relation to HIPAA compliance. Hospitals often use HIPAA encryption and proprietary file formats in an attempt to protect patient information, but content is unsecured in many standard applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel, allowing information…

By Walter Boyd, senior privacy advisor, IDT911 Consulting. As covered entities grapple with increased responsibilities for preventing and responding to unauthorized disclosures of protected health information (PHI), IT teams are examining where they may be vulnerable and how to respond if a breach is discovered. But because many small healthcare organizations rely heavily on outside…