Privacy & Security
MemorialCare Health System, a top 100 integrated delivery network, implemented awareness computing technology at the Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif. The goal is to provide roaming clinicians instant access to patient records throughout the hospital, while also ensuring top security.
Massachusetts healthcare providers are adopting health information technology and health data exchange and drawing consumer support for going digital, according to a new study from Massachusetts eHealth Institute.
Sure, HIPAA adds a layer of privacy protection for certain health data -- if organizations actually comply with it -- but there remains myriad avenues of mining health data and selling to the highest bidder that do not fall under the purview of HIPAA's privacy and security rules. And they may surprise you.
Few healthcare IT policies these days are as delicate, sensitive and potentially emotionally explosive as efforts to restrict or regulate employee social media activity. And yet hospital hierarchies are routinely stepping on these political minefields as providers try to protect their reputations.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT continues to reshape itself as it adjusts to funding limits. To that end, National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, has outlined a new working group structure for ONC's Health IT Policy Committee.
As director of health information technology policy and programs for the National Partnership for Women and Families, Mark Savage keeps a close watch on healthcare information technology, along with all other aspects of patient care.
The Office for Civil Rights, the HHS division responsible for enforcing HIPAA, is slated to get a new director after the official departure of Leon Rodriguez.
When an organization experiences a major data breach and puts out a news release, the point is to comfort people that the news isn't as bad as it sounds. But at the same time, it's critical to be precise with language -- lest that organization be compelled to subsequently issue the dreaded, "What we actually meant to say in Monday's statement…" statement.
In one of the largest HIPAA breaches ever reported, the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services is notifying some 1.3 million people after hackers gained unfettered access to an agency server for nearly a year before being discovered.
More than 60 percent of all industries worldwide embrace BYOD, says Mac McMillan, CEO of the information security company CynergisTek and chairman of the HIMSS Privacy and Security Task Force. In healthcare, that number stands at around 85 percent, with 92 percent of that number saying personal mobile devices are in use multiple times every day.