Posts about Health Privacy by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
Quietly, at the end of April, HIPAA was significantly weakened. HHS published what sounds like an innocuous notification in the Federal Register: Notification of Enforcement Discretion Regarding HIPAA Civil Money Penalties. This notification is actually an enormous change to the HIPAA penalty structure, a drastic reduction in HIPAA fines. The existing penalty structure under HIPAA […]
There have been quite a number of state HIPAA enforcement cases this year, and one expert points out a trend toward increasing state enforcement of HIPAA. An article in Data Breach Today discusses a number of state HIPAA enforcement cases. Here are some of the ones discussed: Massachusetts — $75,000 settlement with McLean Hospital for […]
Have you ever asked your healthcare provider to send you medical records by email? Most likely, you’ve received the reply: “We can’t do that. We can only fax them to you or provide you with a paper copy.” This answer is wrong. HIPAA’s right for individuals to access their health information, 45 CFR § 164.524, provides: […]
A study released last month in Jama Open Network entitled Assessment of US Hospital Compliance With Regulations for Patients’ Requests for Medical Records demonstrates that compliance with HIPAA’s right to access medical records remains woeful. In the second half of 2017, researchers contacted 83 US hospitals and conducted a simulated patient experience to ask for medical records. […]
This HIPAA cartoon involves the notice of privacy practices (NPP) under HIPAA. HIPAA has a set of detailed requirements for the NPP. See 45 CFR 164.520 for the text of HIPAA’s requirement for NPPs. The biggest challenge regarding privacy notices is that hardly anyone actually reads the notice, and notices are often a chore to read. There is […]
This HIPAA cartoon involves confidentiality. There are countless cases of misdirected PHI that is emailed or faxed to the wrong people. I recently created a new short course on HIPAA Confidentiality. You can learn more about it here. HIPAA Resources HIPAA Training Courses HIPAA Training Guide HIPAA Training Requirements FAQ HIPAA Whiteboard HIPAA Resources
Here’s a new HIPAA cartoon. This cartoon is about protected health information (PHI). In the HIPAA regulations, the definition of PHI is quite complicated, as it is splintered into at least three separate parts that appear in HIPAA’s definitions section. Pursuant to HIPAA, 45 CFR 160.103: Health information means any information, including genetic information, whether oral or recorded […]
Recently, I created two new HIPAA training resources. HIPAA Whiteboard I created a 1-page visual summary of HIPAA, which I call the HIPAA Whiteboard. The idea was to summarize HIPAA in a concise and visually-engaging way. You can download a PDF handout version here. We’ve been licensing it to many organizations for training and awareness purposes. […]
At the end of 2017, the OCR logged just under $20 million in fines for HIPAA violations from 10 enforcement actions with monetary penalties. In 2016, the total in penalties was roughly the same amount but from 15 organizations. Here is an overview of the resolution agreements and enforcement actions with civil monetary penalties from […]
Many app developers overlook privacy and security by failing to do one of the most basic first steps of data protection – informing consumers of their practices. For example, in a study published in 2016 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 80% of diabetes apps surveyed didn’t have a notice informing consumers about privacy […]