Posts about HIPAA by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
The first quarter of 2017 is not yet over and the OCR has already released details of four HIPAA enforcement penalties totaling over $11 million. 2016 set a record with $20 million in fines for the year, with $5.2 million of that coming in the first quarter. In just the first 2 months of […]
Time to call the Guinness Book of World Records because HHS has set a new world record in HIPAA enforcement. 2016 saw a considerable increase in HIPAA enforcement resolution agreements and monetary penalties. At the end of 2016, the OCR logged over $20 million in fines for HIPAA violations from 15 enforcement actions with monetary […]
This cartoon is about snooping, one of the most common HIPAA violations. HIPAA prohibits accessing information that people don’t need to do their jobs. It can be easy to look at electronic medical records, and people who snoop in this way might not perceive it as wrong. But the cartoon invites people to imagine how […]
Here’s a cartoon on HIPAA and social media use to jump start your week. You can’t think enough about HIPAA these days. HIPAA audits are back, and OCR is having a vigorous enforcement year this year, something I plan to post about soon.
HIPAA is famously impenetrable, with so many special terms and definitions. I wrote this cartoon to capture the wonderful world of HIPAA jargon, which I hope fellow lovers of HIPAA can appreciate. I have another HIPAA cartoon here.
A Not-So-Far-Fetched Seinfeld Episode In a Seinfeld episode called “The Package” from 1996 (click here to see the scene), airing just months after HIPAA was passed, Elaine goes to see a doctor for a rash.
Recently, HIPAA celebrated its 20th birthday. HHS issued a celebratory blog post. HIPAA is 20 years old if you start counting from the date the statute was passed (1996). If we measure HIPAA’s age from the date that the HIPAA Privacy Rule became effective (2003), then HIPAA is 13. So HIPAA could be 20 years […]
As ransomware escalates and poses serious security risks for healthcare institutions, many privacy experts and legislators have called for more specific guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A few weeks ago, HHS responded to these calls with a detailed fact sheet to explain ransomware and provide advice. Although most of […]
Recently, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued its first HIPAA resolution agreement and monetary penalty against a business associate (BA).
A new report by Verizon, the PHI Data Breach report, analyzes 1,931 data breaches of protected health information (PHI) under HIPAA, The incidents occurred between 1994 and 2014, with most occurring from 2004-2014. An article from Computer World sums up the findings of the report. One interesting statistic is that 392 million PHI records were […]