Eleven more fines, are you next? OCR recently announced that 11 more entities were fined for failing to provide timely access to patient records following a patient complaint. This list included mental health practitioners, dentists, and more. This announcement proves 3 things – organizations aren’t getting the message, patients are aware of the requirement, and …
HIPAA Breaches and You In the past 12 months, we’ve averaged over 3.3 million breached healthcare records per month. Aside from the breach of confidentiality this represents, the information in those records is used for financial fraud, insurance fraud, identity theft, and in some cases, blackmail. If it’s not happening or impacting you, it’s easy for …
Creating Better Passwords To make passwords “strong,” they must be both unique and lengthy (at least 12 characters). Generally, people are pretty bad at creating passwords that fit either category (much less both). You could let a computer do it for you and if you did, you’d probably get a strong password. Indeed, there are lots …
HIPAA violations are on the rise. Although we didn’t hear too much about breach-related HIPAA violations during the pandemic, incidents were occurring, and the violations are now being pursued and published. The result is a steady stream of penalty announcements coming from OCR that should get everyone’s attention. Most recently, MetroHealth System in Ohio announced …