Privacy & Security
COVID-19
Brazil is among the countries most heavily hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. With its GDPR-inspired data protection law, the country was among the forerunners in regulating digital privacy in 2018. Now, a postponement looks likely as detailed in the latest edition of HIMSS Insights, COVID-19 and Beyond.
The bi-partisan Patient Matching Improvement Act, introduced by Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-New Hampshire, and Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, would make the U.S. Postal Service's address-formatting tool available to hospitals and COVID-19 testing labs.
Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Colorado will share best practices for telehealth and remote patient monitoring, and follow their own state policies while also adhering to seven key principles, their governors say.
COVID-19
Hospital executive minds have understandably been distracted since the start of 2020, but the impact of the emergence of SarsCoV2 has not been limited to its physical toll. It has also torn into data security defences and exposed patient privacy, as explored in the latest issue of HIMSS Insights.
Collaboration tools are undergoing drastic version updates and feature overhauls on a very frequent basis, which force security departments to keep a close eye on upcoming changes to determine whether their standards will still be met.
Trusted Instant Messaging+ aims to offer real-time healthcare communication between known, trusted entities within and across healthcare organizations.
HIMSS editors discuss telehealth, remote patient monitoring, ransomware and more.
On the surface, like with other HHS settlements, it may seem harsh, regarding only the amount of money vis-a-vis the number of patients affected. But it's important to consider what OCR is trying to accomplish.
The Rhode Island health system has settled with OCR for the HIPAA violation after an employee's computer went missing – with protected health information of 20,431 individuals left accessible.
This week's top stories include hospitals scrambling to comply with the requirement to submit data to HHS, privacy issues with Google and Apple's contact tracing app, and the feds partnering with Pfizer on a potential COVID-19 vaccine.