Information for 63,551 patients for Middletown Medical, a multispecialty physician group in Middletown, New York, was exposed due to a misconfigured security setting on a radiology interface.
Q: I'm in charge of a coding audit for our department for the first time and trying to determine how many cases to use as a sample. What factors should I consider when choosing the sample?
Ms. P arrives on a medical unit at a major medical center escorted by two armed police guards from the local jail. The social worker, Ann, asks about the reason for the guards and the length of time that they will be on the unit, but the officers tell her they can’t share this information.
Q: We are a doctor’s office in a small town. Recently, one of our patients threw away some papers containing PHI in a wastebasket in the waiting room. Another patient’s child later took them out of the wastebasket. The child’s parent brought the papers up to the desk and apologized. Is this a privacy breach? Are we responsible for the papers even though we turned them over to the patient?
This week’s Medicare updates include the April edition of the Medicare Quarterly Provider Compliance Newsletter, a new OIG compliance website providing resources for the public to use to ensure compliance, an updated OIG work plan, and more!
This week's note from the instructor digs into the deeper details of recently reissued Medicare guidance on drug testing and specimen validity testing in light of a recent OIG report on improper payments related to drug testing.
