Q. Is it a HIPAA violation if a hospital receives a faxed Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) request and the hospital cannot identify the patient by full name, last name, or date of birth? These requests contain name, date of birth, provider, and the HEDIS Measure (Chlamydia screening, cervical cancer screening, cholesterol management, etc.) and last date of service of the patient. Typically, these faxed requests are from business associates of the patient's health insurance, but occasionally they come directly from the insurance company.
If there's one conclusion you can reach looking back at data breaches over the last decade, it's that organizations face more threats than ever, according to HIPAA professionals.
To comply with the HIPAA omnibus final rule, healthcare organizations need to revise their risk assessment process to determine whether they must notify affected individuals of a breach.
Reliable data backup is critical. If a backup is not in place and your system crashes, you not only have a HIPAA compliance problem, but you may not be able to support your critical operations. IDrive® is a secure backup service that provides "ready when you need it" backup restoration and meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology safe harbor encryption standard.
Also known as the "mega rules," the omnibus final rules are clarifications and finalizations of the HIPAA rules of 2003, the HITECH rules of 2008, and the incorporation of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) rules into the Privacy and Security rules. These are not sweeping changes, as many describe, but clarifications. In most cases, what are now final rules are best practices that organizations should already be following.
