Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

See the following -

Healthcare Isn't A Free Market, It's A Giant Economic Scam

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | February 22, 2013

You hear stories about crazy medical bills, but what very few people realize is that the reality of hospital bills can often be orders of magnitude more crazy than what most people expect. [...] Stephen Brill has a very long, but absolutely gripping, detailed analysis of the insanity of medical billing for Time Magazine... Read More »

HIE 'Rules Of Road': What's Next?

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee | GovInfoSecurity.com | September 17, 2012

Supporters of a recent decision by federal regulators to back away from issuing voluntary "rules of the road" for secure health information exchange say the move makes sense [...]. But some others argue that establishing HIE benchmarks, especially for privacy and security, is advisable now to help build public trust. Read More »

HIEs Craft Strategies For Non-Targeted Query

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | June 26, 2013

In the process of creating health information exchange recommendations, the Health IT Policy Committee’s Privacy & Security Tiger Team is considering practices that have been developed for a critical care coordination practice: non-targeted query. Read More »

Hybrid Clouds Fuel Choices For Health IT

Maureen Kaplan | Healthcare IT News | July 24, 2013

Many healthcare companies are using a range of infrastructure services to meet their changing IT needs. This usually begins with storing data in an in-house data center then moving to collocation in an outsourced data center. Read More »

Ignoring Social Media Trends May Be Harmful For Hospitals

Matthew Smith | Health Directions | July 10, 2013

A new report from Hewlett-Packard Social Media Solutions claims hospitals put both their patients and reputations at risk by ignoring social media. Read More »

Improved Routine Access To Health Data Ensures Disaster Preparedness

Molly Bernhart Walker | FierceGovernmentIT | October 8, 2012

State health information exchanges can best prepare for emergencies by ensuring that health information is readily accessible during routine care, concludes a report (.pdf) from the Southeast Regional HIT-HIE Collaboration published in July. But the report finds day-to-day health information sharing is a challenge, as individual state's efforts and HIE implementation timelines vary considerably. Read More »

Interoperability Hurdles Impede ACOs

Joseph Conn | Modern Healthcare | January 20, 2016

For accountable care organizations, a lack of interoperability between their health information technology systems and those of providers outside their ACO is the No. 1 challenge they face, cited by 79% of respondents to a survey of 68 ACOs by group purchaser and performance-improvement company Premier and health IT collaborative eHealth Initiative...

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IT Iconoclasts: Experts Offer Dissent On Policy Issues, Technology Implementation

Joseph Conn | Information Technology | January 28, 2013

Each month, more hospitals and office-based physicians buy and use electronic medical records and other health information technologies as the U.S. presses on toward achieving the goal first articulated by President George W. Bush in 2004: providing most Americans with access to an electronic medical record within a decade... Read More »

Johns Hopkins and VMware Forge Medical Records Mega-Cloud

Timothy Prickett Morgan | The Register | February 16, 2012

Medical and IT researchers at Johns Hopkins University, healthcare application software supplier Harris Corp, and virtualization juggernaut VMware have teamed up to create a medical imaging cloud that they hope will become the central, secure repository for US citizens and the doctors who care for them. Read More »

Key Organizations Come Together in Support of Patient-Centered and Interoperable Health IT

Press Release | National Association for Trusted Exchange, CommonWell Health Alliance | May 3, 2016

The National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE) and CommonWell Health Alliance® today announced that each would become a member of the other’s organization. They have agreed to establish a mutual synergistic and complementary relationship with the goal of enhancing cross-vendor interoperability to better assure provider and patient access to health data regardless of where care occurs. NATE is a not-for-profit membership association focused on enabling trusted exchange among organizations and individuals with differing regulatory environments and exchange preferences...

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Keylogger Hack At Root Of HIPAA Breach

Erin McCann | HealthCare IT News | May 19, 2014

A keystroke logger infecting three computers has been blamed for swiping the medical and financial data of UC Irvine Student Health Center patients. The keylogger was discovered by the California Information Security Office March 26, and had been capturing and transmitting the data to unauthorized servers for more than one month before being detected, according to a UC Irvine patient notification letter.

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Larry Ponemon On Securing Regulated Data In Healthcare: Q&A

Patrick Ouellette | Health IT Security | July 8, 2013

Though mobile applications that share files through the cloud such as Box and DropBox can be appealing to consumers, the Ponemon Institute has found that these types of applications can be unsafe in a clinical environment. [...] Read More »

Lawsuit Says IRS Illegally Seized 60 Million Health Records

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | May 15, 2013

A lawsuit filed in California accuses the Internal Revenue Service of illegal seizure of 60 million electronic health care records belonging to 10 million Americans. Read More »

Legal Considerations in Joining an HIE

Chris Dimick | Journal of AHIMA | September 1, 2011

The legal issues healthcare organizations must consider when joining a health information exchange (HIE) go far beyond the standard HIPAA-related concerns. Read More »

Maintaining Health Data Privacy in Precision Medicine Push

Elizabeth Snell | Health IT Security | March 31, 2017

As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve and put PHI at risk, precision medicine guidelines need to be updated to account for new health data privacy threats, according to a recent opinion piece published in the Oxford University Press. The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System Senior Counsel Jennifer Kulynych, JD, PhD explained that data re-identification methods are not foolproof, and it can be difficult to determine exactly how individuals’ genomes are being used...

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