Incident: Idaho State University (ISU) operates 29 outpatient clinics and is responsible for providing health information technology systems technology systems security at those clinics. Between four and eight of those ISU clinics are subject to the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules, including the clinic where the breach occurred.
The HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation after ISU notified HHS of the breach in which the ePHI of approximately 17,500 patients was unsecured for at least 10 months, due to the disabling of firewall protections at servers maintained by ISU. OCR’s investigation indicated that ISU’s risk analyses and assessments of its clinics were incomplete and inadequately identified potential risks or vulnerabilities. ISU also failed to assess the likelihood of potential risks occurring.
OCR concluded that ISU did not apply proper security measures and policies to address risks to ePHI and did not have procedures for routine review of their information system in place, which could have detected the firewall breach much sooner.
On August 9, 2011, HHS received notification from ISU regarding a breach of its unsecured electronic protected health information (ePHI).
On November 22, 2011 HHS notified ISU of its investigation regarding ISU’s compliance with the Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules. HHS’ investigation indicated that the following conduct occurred (“Covered Conduct”).
i. ISU did not conduct an analysis of the risk to the
In the health care business, there are certain standards and laws that have been put in place to protect our patients and their personal health information. When a health care facility fails to protect their patient’s confidential information, the US Government may get involved and facilities may be forced to pay huge sums of money in fines, and risk damaging their reputation.
In August 2000, Kaiser Permanente Online experienced a serious security breach, due to a flawed script written in the pharmacy refill application. The security breach concatenated several hundred individual e-mails containing personal patient data. As a result of the breach, 19 members received Private Health Information (PHI) about other members. Kaiser Permanente was made aware of the breach when two members notified the organization that they had received the concatenated e-mail messages.
This case presents a prime example of privacy violation. The Federal privacy rule 42 CFR, part 2 mandated addition privacy protection for any health record that is generated in the treatment of patients in the federal alcohol and drug program (Hughes, 2002). The HIPAA privacy rule dictates that healthcare organizations must not disclose any identifying patient information, or alert any entity that a particular patient is participating in alcohol/drug treatment program. This type of privacy breach must be reported promptly to the internal review board (IRB), compliance officer, risk management office and the privacy officer at the healthcare organization. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act and the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) act also mandated that any healthcare organization or any covered entity under the HIPAA act should promptly notify individual patients about the accidental disclosure of their medical information; the time from discovery of breach of PHI to patient’s notification must not be more than 60 days. In addition, to patient notification, the covered entity must also report such incidents to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and to the media if the breach affects more than 500 patients, and if the breach affects less than 500 patients, notifying the patients and the
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed by congress in 1996, and helps to ensure the privacy and security of Electronic Health Records (EHR's). By following the rules and regulations set forth under HIPAA, we can ensure the safety of patients' EHR's. We are responsible for protecting patients' records, and there are many measures we can take in order do this. Firstly, we must always keep patients' health information private. This means no discussing the records with people that are not authorized to know, and even then, we should only disclose the minimum necessary amount of information possible. For covered entities, we must designate a privacy and security officer to ensure the privacy
Healthcare technology has grown and evolved over time. With the conversion to electronic medical records and the creation of social media just to name a few, ensuring patient privacy is of the utmost importance for healthcare facilities in this day and age. In order for an organization to avoid hefty fines, it is imperative that a healthcare administrator maintains compliance with the standards and regulations associated with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This paper will provide a summary
Patients are also entitled to receive notice on how their health information is shared by health care covered entities, and are entitled to request a report once a year, free of charge, detailing who has received copies of their health information. Another aspect of the privacy rules provides patients with the right to choose who may receive health care information. Patients should be aware, however, that the provider does not have to agree to abide by their requests. Patients may determine whether or not their private health information may be shared with family members or others. Patients may also choose where they receive their health information. They could choose to receive their information via telephone, cell phone, e-mail, or any other reasonable means of contact. HIPAA also requires that covered entities provide their policies to patients that include information on how a patient might be able to file a complaint with either the covered entity or with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, n.d.).
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for issuing periodic guidance on the provisions in the HIPAA Security Rule (45 C.F.R §§ 164.302-318). The privacy and security risk analysis is the first step in helping health organizations determine any potential risk that might cause a data breach. In December 2014, OCR opened an investigation after receiving notification from Achorage Community Mental Health Services (ACMHS) regarding a breach of unsecured PHI affecting 2743 individuals due to malware compromising the security of its information technology resources. It turned out that ACMHS adopted sample Security Rule policies and procedures in 2005. The security incident was the direct result of ACMHS failing to identify and address basic risks in the privacy risk analysis.
HIPAA (Health Insurance and Portability Act of 1996), outlines rules, regulations and the rights of patients to access their healthcare information such as notifications of privacy practices, copying and viewing medical records, and amendments. This paper explains why confidentiality is important today and discusses recourses patients can use if they believe their privacy has been violated. This paper will also discuss criminal and civil penalties’ that can occur for breaking HIPAA privacy rules.
Any patient that is seen by a physician within the United States is to be protected by the “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act” or HIPAA, which was passed into law in 1996 (Jani, 2009). All health care facilities dealing with any protected health information (PHI) are to ensure that all physical/electronic processes are safeguarded from any third party entity or unauthorized personnel according to HIPAA. All health care data to include any medical insurance
HIPAA and HITECH Act help address several problems associated with inappropriate use of healthcare information by authorized users. HIPAA requires minimum necessary infor-mation to be released while HITECH goes into a little further detail but still to release minimum necessary information. Several different organizations need to define how they go about han-dling inappropriate use of information. A guideline must be set within the organization on who will have access to the information and how it is disbursed to other healthcare organizations re-questing records.
Many healthcare professionals and organizations have not been following the regulations set forth by HIPAA. Whenever violations of HIPAA’s privacy or security laws occur the organizations responsible must be held accountable resulting in a fine or penalty. Penalties provide incentive for organizations to guarantee patient privacy and security. Recently, certain people have failed to follow through with the laws and restrictions and were forced to accept the penalty. This paper will provide three real examples of such HIPAA violations as well as solutions or ways each violation could have been prevented.
A strong and independent minded man named James H. Meredith applied for acceptance into the University of Mississippi. Meredith "anticipated on encountering some type of difficulty" with his attempt to enter the University of Mississippi, also known as the Ole Miss, but 'difficulty' would not describe his journey. The day after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in early January of 1961, Meredith requested for application into the Ole Miss. On January 26, the registrar of Ole Miss, Robert B. Ellis, sent him an application along with a letter indicating that the university was "very pleased to know of [Meredith's] interest in becoming a member of our student body" (JFK Library). Meredith applied on January 31,
Late November of 2014, many students at Southern Oregon University are starting to get ready for Thanksgiving, finals, and Winter Break. However, during this time, my life was forever changed. In 2014 I was raped, twice, by someone I thought was my friend, someone I trusted, someone who I had even had consensual sex with once before. Sometime during the night, I can no longer remember certain details, my attacker got on top of me as I was doing homework and started to forcefully take off my clothes, trying to entice me into having sex. He then forced himself inside me and raped me. It took me four months before I had realized that I had been raped and that he had terrified me enough to stay with him for a week after the first attack to rape me one more time. After what had happened I didn’t report the attacks until seven months after the attack, I did not know enough information about him for the police to do anything other than taking a formal written and oral statement.
The department of Health and Human Services protects and guides the health and well being of individuals here in America (Thacker, 2014). They fulfill these duties providing Americans with adequate and efficient health and human services and monitoring services designed to increase the efficiency of care in the health system (Thacker, 2014). One of the services being monitored by the department of Health and Human Services is the electronic health record system, which carries private and vital information of patient’s health record enabling all eligible participating health workers access to these records (Thacker, 2014). A breach of the protective health information of patients in a health organization creates chaos as these are against the health insurance portability and accountability (HIPAA) law (Thacker, 2014). Hence, measure will have to be put in place to determine what caused the breach and how to rectify it to ensure the breach never happens again (Thacker, 2014).
Price of everything has shoot up weather it is food, clothing, education or health which has put great impact on the people especially the low-level peoples. The increased price of medications has bought several problems even sometimes took life of many people who couldn 't afford. The top selling prescription medicines has increased steadily. What can be the reasons for it? The higher medication cost has squeezed the happiness of many family and throw them to poverty.