Compliance & Legal

As a result of an investigation into overdue financial reports and threats of Nasdaq delisting, Veradigm CEO Richard Poulton and CFO Leah Jones resigned at the request of the company's board on Friday. The IT vendor also announced a billing AI tool.

This agency's first data breach settlement under HIPAA for a phishing attack involved the alleged failure to conduct a risk analysis to identify potential ePHI threats or vulnerabilities across the Lafourche Medical Group network.

"The AHA cannot support proposals for mandatory cybersecurity requirements being levied on hospitals as if they were at fault for the success of hackers in perpetrating a crime," says Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association.

AI can improve health equity, according to Dr. Michael Howell, chief clinical officer at Google, who will discuss the evolution of the company's medically tuned LLM and make regulatory recommendations for the use of AI in healthcare.  

Some healthcare organizations use homegrown tracking technologies to avoid third-party disclosures of protected information, but all have to understand if their practices comply with applicable privacy laws, says Betsy Hodge, partner at Akerman.

OCR investigated Saint Joseph’s Medical Center for alleged violations of HIPAA when it disclosed three patients’ PHI to the Associated Press without written authorization. 

HHS is proposing expensive new disincentives to prevent information blocking. There are significant details to be aware of, especially around a list of enumerated exceptions – and HCOs must work quickly to understand them, data privacy experts say.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Texas, the hospital group says enforcement of the Office for Civil Rights' regs on pixel tracking tools would disrupt the "balance that HIPAA and its regulations strike between privacy and information-sharing."

While the agreement is not an admission of liability, Doctors’ Management Services has agreed to pay a penalty of $100,000 and be subject to HIPAA-compliance monitoring by OCR for three years.

The CMS-based disincentives outlined in the proposed rule from ONC published Monday would penalize hospitals under the Promoting Interoperability Program, eligible clinicians under MIPS and ACO participants under the Medicare Shared Savings Program.