HIPAA

Q: Does sending a generic “happy birthday” postcard to patients during their birthday month violate HIPAA rules?

Around a dozen employees of the Washington Health System (WHS) in Washington County, Pennsylvania, have reportedly been suspended for HIPAA violations involving alleged inappropriate access to patient records, according to the Washington County Observer-Reporter.

Q: Is it a violation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule to make a comment while working at a pharmacy that “we’ve seen a lot of flu cases”?

HIPAA requires covered entities to protect and confidentially handle patients’ protected health information. Organizations must remain vigilant or they risk violating HIPAA

Use these key takeaways from the recent Ponemon study on security risks to boost your organization's security.

This month's Q&A answers readers' questions about using PHI for healthcare operations, text message encryption, and more.

The United States federal government needs to improve electronic health record data security and privacy, according to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) recently released federal information technology systems audit.

Semantics often gets in the way when it comes to HIPAA Security Rule requirements—and the results can be costly mistakes for your organization in terms of wasted resources, not to mention not satisfying OCR. It’s time for your organization to get a grip on what exact security measures it’s performing.

If your healthcare organization thinks distributing a Notice of Privacy Practices (NPP) form, ensuring patients acknowledge receiving it, and maintaining those acknowledgments is a burden, the government may agree with you.

The number of data breaches in the first quarter of 2018 marked a four-year low with a total of 685 breaches. This number is down from 1,444 breaches in the first quarter of 2017 and 1,153 in the first quarter of 2016.