Q: I perform monthly HIPAA audits of computer systems at the medical group where I am employed. I recently started auditing physicians and allied health professionals who are credentialed members of our medical staff.
Q: It is my understanding that written authorization is required for the release of PHI even for treatment, payment, and operations purposes. I believe this is true in New York state, but am unsure if it is also true nationally.
Q: Is there a sample risk analysis about how an enterprise or clinic might evaluate and determine if data-at-rest protection through encryption is reasonable and appropriate as defined in the HIPAA Security Rule?
Q: As part of the audit controls policy at my organization, we hired an external security vendor to collect and review logs from several critical servers. The vendor creates tickets for our IT staff when a potential incident is discovered during the daily log review. This supplements our own activity reviews of internally generated reports, and the vendor then uses them for its own review. Our internal staff never sees the reports the vendor uses for its review. Do the reports the vendor uses fall under the HIPAA requirement for retaining logs for six years? Should we compel the vendor to retain these reports?
