This was an eventful year for healthcare cybersecurity and privacy incidents and developments. But what's ahead for 2019? Here are eight predictions from privacy and security expert Rebecca Herold.
Healthcare entities need to take a number of important steps to defend against cyberattacks involving remote access, say Chad Waters and Juuso Leinonen, security engineers at the ECRI Institute, which recently singled out hackers remotely accessing medical devices and systems as the No. 1 technology hazard.
In the latest in a series of HIPAA enforcement actions taken by states this year, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey's office has signed a $75,000 consent judgment with McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility, in connection with a breach that affected 1,500 individuals.
For the second time this year, health insurer EmblemHealth has been hit with a state financial penalty in connection with a 2016 breach that exposed Social Security numbers on mailings to more than 81,000 plan members.
Will the Department of Health and Human Services' request for feedback on potential changes to HIPAA eventually result in modifications to the regulation, including certain provisions that touch on privacy and security issues? There's a long road to travel before any changes actually might get made.
In its third enforcement action in recent weeks, federal regulators have hit a Colorado medical center with a HIPAA fine in a case involving failure to terminate a former employee's remote access to patient data. Other organizations can use the case as a "teachable moment," one attorney advises.
Two health IT professional associations are urging Congress to "modernize" HIPAA to extend patients' rights to securely access, view, download and transmit their health information - including health data not currently covered under HIPAA. Regulatory experts size up whether the proposed changes are feasible.
In a groundbreaking effort, the attorneys general of a dozen states have jointly filed a federal lawsuit against a cloud-based electronic health records vendor that reported a 2015 data breach affecting 3.9 million individuals.
Federal regulators have slapped a company that provides contracted physicians to hospitals and nursing homes with a $500,000 HIPAA settlement in a breach case involving the lack of a business associate agreement with an individual providing billing services.
A security review of two Medicaid managed care organizations in Arizona revealed several significant access control and configuration vulnerabilities, raising concerns about whether other MCOs face similar challenges.
A lawsuit over a Florida dentist's inability to access patient data stored by a cloud-based electronic medical records vendor illustrates why all healthcare providers need to plan for possible disruptions caused by disputes with business associates.
In at least the fourth federal HIPAA case involving improper disclosure of patient information to the media, federal regulators have slapped a three-doctor practice in Connecticut with a financial penalty.
Federal regulators plan to seek public comments on whether the HIPAA rules create barriers to sharing patient information among healthcare providers, hampering the ability to coordinate care. But some regulatory experts argue the problem is not the rules, but misunderstandings about what they allow.
An inside view of what HHS OCR is seeing on the healthcare sector privacy and security landscape, and what the agency has in the works to address those challenges. That includes:
Insights from OCR's latest breach and compliance investigations of covered entities and BAs.
An update on OCR's HIPAA enforcement...
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