HIPAA

Too many healthcare organizations are receiving ­failing grades for HIPAA compliance, an analysis of OCR's first 20 initial audits reveals.

If HIM professionals needed another reason to be ­concerned with protected health information (PHI) ­outside of paper records, a surgery center in Arizona ­provided one in April.

If you don't know where all of your PHI is, how can you ensure that you protect it?

The initial 20 OCR HIPAA audits offer insight with respect to privacy and security compliance.

Learn how to protect privacy and security when participating in a health information exchange.

Focus of OCR HIPAA auditors might surprise some healthcare organizations.

Healthcare organizations face increasingly complex privacy and security issues as they cope with new technology, but many organizations are still struggling with the basics of establishing a compliance program. A natural place to begin is a code of conduct, and policies and procedures.

The use of mobile devices, from laptop computers to smartphones, represents a dramatic trend in healthcare, and they pose an entirely new risk to PHI.

Would your staff know how to respond in these situations? Use these scenarios to test their knowledge of HIPAA.

Chris Apgar, CISSP, president of Apgar & Associates in Portland, Ore., answers questions about digital signatures and the HIPAA minimum necessary standard.