A new phishing scam targeting covered entities (CE) and business associates (BA) is disguised as an official communication from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). In an alert released November 28, OCR advised CEs and BAs that a phishing email is being circulated on fake HHS letterhead with the signature of Jocelyn Samuels, OCR’s director.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) agreed to a $650,000 HIPAA settlement fine after a breach investigation revealed the university failed to implement basic security measures.
Single-use drug vial wastage and CMS’ implementation of the Quality Payment Program are in the spotlight in the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) fiscal year 2017 Work Plan. The Work Plan, released November 10, outlines areas the OIG will scrutinize in the coming year and ongoing projects.
Data breaches spiked dramatically in the second half of the year but some experts at AHIMA’s 2016 national convention in Baltimore suggest the apparent surge might be caused in part by improved reporting.
The Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) guidance on patient access fees released earlier this year muddied the waters for providers and complicated the release of information (ROI) process, experts at the October 15–19 AHIMA national convention in Baltimore agreed.
My original career choice in high school was to pursue a degree in medicine. It was my father, a high school librarian, who discovered an undergraduate degree option of medical record administration as opposed to the typical pre-med route of biology. I had no knowledge of what this program would truly entail other than a combination of medicine, business, and legal coursework. What did it matter since my ultimate goal was to become a physician?
The Health Information Management Reimagined (HIMR) taskforce is charged with envisioning for the HIM profession in 10 years. The HIMR vision was created to ensure current and future professionals are prepared for the future of HIM in the rapidly changing environment resulting from changes in healthcare, technology, and education. Under the direction of the Council for Excellence in Education (CEE), the taskforce comprises educators from all academic levels (associate, baccalaureate, and graduate) as well as HIM practitioners. The CEE oversight body comprises educators and practitioners who hold a variety of HIM credentials including Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT), Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA), and other specialty credentials.
A massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack crippled New Hampshire-based Dyn, one of the major domain name system hosts that monitors and reroutes internet traffic, October 21 and raised
