PRIVACY + SECURITY BLOG

News, Developments, and Insights

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Lessons from the Latest HIPAA Enforcement Action

HIPAA Training OCR Enforcement

by Daniel J. Solove Recently, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) publicized its resolution agreement in its HIPAA enforcement action against St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (SEMC).  SEMC agreed to pay $218,000. The case began with a complaint filed with OCR back in 2012 that employees […]

New Resource Page: Text of HIPAA’s Training Requirements

HIPAA Training Requirements

by Daniel J. Solove I recently created a new resource page for the TeachPrivacy website: Text of HIPAA’s Training Requirements.  This page provides excerpts of the training provisions in the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Security Rule. This page is designed to be a useful companion page to our resource page, HIPAA Training Requirements: […]

Health Data Security in Crisis, Phase 2 Audits, and Other HIPAA Privacy + Security Updates

By Daniel J. Solove Co-authored with Professor Paul Schwartz This post is part of a post series where we round up some of the interesting news and resources we’re finding. We have split the health/HIPAA material from our updates on other topics. To see our updates for other topics, click here. For a PDF version […]

The Health Data Breach and ID Theft Epidemic

By Daniel J. Solove When you go to the hospital, you might worry about catching a staph infection or pneumonia, but you should also worry about contracting a nasty case of medical identity theft. Most people suffer significant harm from medical ID theft, and few are completely cured. This ailment is spreading dramatically as data […]

The Most Alarming Fact of the HIPAA Audits

by Daniel J. Solove Are privacy and security laws being enforced effectively? This post is post #5 of a series called Enforcing Privacy and Security Laws. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), various organizations can be randomly selected to be audited – even if no complaint has been issued against them and […]

The Brave New World of HIPAA Enforcement

by Daniel J. Solove Are privacy and security laws being enforced effectively? This post is post #4 of a series called Enforcing Privacy and Security Laws. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations govern health information maintained by various entities covered by HIPAA (“covered entities”) and other organizations that receive health information from […]

Waking Up the C-Suite to Privacy and Security Risks

by Daniel J. Solove I was recently interviewed in the Journal of AHIMA on how the C-suite is waking up to the new realities of privacy and data security risks. Before the HITECH Act in 2009, HIPAA enforcement was based on a cooperative model where HHS was not punitive in its approach. Now, big fines […]

The Battle for Leadership in Education Privacy Law: Will California Seize the Throne?

by Daniel J. Solove This post was co-authored by Professor Paul Schwartz, Berkeley Law School. Education was one of the first areas where privacy was regulated by a federal statute. Passed in the early 1970s, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was on the frontier of federal privacy regulation. But now it is […]