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Update: On September 9, 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights settles its first HIPAA violation case under its 2019 Right of Access Initiative. Bayfront Health St. Petersburg (Bayfront), a Florida hospital, paid $85,000 to OCR and adopted a corrective action plan to settle a potential violation of the right […]

  On May 28, 2019, Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced a settlement with healthcare software providers Medical Informatics Engineering Inc. and NoMoreClipboard, LLC regarding some claims brought against them under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). By way of background. Defendants were business associates that were providing health records services that enabled […]

    On April 30, 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it would be using its discretion in how it applies HHS regulations concerning the assessment of Civil Money Penalties (CMPs) under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), as such provision was amended by the Health […]

On September 20, 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that it reached settlement with several medical centers after they allegedly compromised patients’ protected health information (PHI) by inviting film crews on premises to film an ABC’s television documentary series, without first obtaining authorization from patients. According to […]

On November 14, 2014, the Court of Appeals of Indiana found a pharmacist and her employer liable for the damages sustained by a customer as a result of the pharmacist’s HIPAA breach. The pharmacist breached one of her most sacred duties by viewing the prescription records of a customer without consent and for personal purposes and […]

Penalties under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are likely to increase substantially in the coming year, according to a high-ranking attorney in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Law360, the publication that first reported the comment, said HHS received more than $10 million for alleged HIPAA violations since June 2013, at […]

It only takes one – one patient complaint, one number coming up in a random audit, or one small device with unencrypted patient information that disappears from a car or apartment or tumbles from a backpack or purse tossed onto a restaurant chair. The cost of compliance with HIPAA protocols and documentation sure seems small […]

              It only takes one – one patient complaint, one number coming up in a random audit, or one small device with unencrypted patient information that disappears from a car or apartment or tumbles from a backpack or purse tossed onto a restaurant chair. The cost of compliance with […]

From the introduction to the summary: “The Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information (“Privacy Rule”) establishes, for the first time, a set of national standards for the protection of certain health information. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) issued the Privacy Rule to implement the requirement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act […]

UPDATE On Washington privacy Act  March 2020 – Washington Privacy Act fails again It was almost given for granted that the Washington Privacy Act would have passed this time. The Washington State House and Senate were debating two similar bills. The major difference was in the enforcement mechanism: while in the House’s Bill both the […]