If a lawyer hits you with a subpoena for a patient’s protected health information, don’t panic—or you may not only violate the patient’s privacy rights under HIPAA, but also be subject to civil action under state law.
The Washington legislature unanimously passed a bill in April that will shorten the state’s data breach notification time to 30 days, which is half the time required by HIPAA.
In Maryland, an innovative program called SBIRIT (Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment) is helping take some of the weight off case managers working with substance use disorder patients by successfully steering those patients into treatment through the use of peer recovery specialists.
Q: Sometimes providers at our facility perform multiple, separate administrations of hydration that are less than 30 minutes each. Can coders add the separate infusion times together when assigning time-based CPT codes for hydration administration?
Q: Does HIPAA require encryption when sharing data over the internet? Should data be encrypted when it is being emailed to someone at the same facility?
