Healthcare Organizations: What can get you into [costly] hot water?

healthcare org costly hot

For healthcare organizations and the businesses that support them, regulation and legislation too often turn into lawsuits and settlements. What’s happening to get you into trouble in the first place? How can you avoid the serious costs they bring – to the bottom line and to reputation? Here’s what Julia and I often see from … Read more

Return from Remote Work: How do you secure remotely used data & devices?

return from remote work

As things ease up, and slowly people return to the office, what steps do you need to take to make sure data and devices are secure? It’s not quite a reversal of what covered entities (CE) and business associates (BA) went through when everyone who was non-essential was required to go to remote work, but … Read more

Video Hijacking Have You Worried? Try these 5 Steps from the FBI

video hijacking fbi advice apgar

The healthcare industry reports that video hijacking, or teleconference hijacking, emergence on the rise as telehealth appointments replace typical in-person ones during the COVID-19 crisis. The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic images, hate images and threatening language. Yet another reason that, even though OCR has indicated it will not … Read more

Attention Business Associates! New OCR Announcement re PHI during COVID-19 Relates to You

Business Associates HIPAA National Emergency

On April 2, 2020, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that effective immediately, it will exercise its enforcement discretion and will not impose penalties for violations of certain provisions of the HIPAA Privacy Rule against health care providers or their business associates for the … Read more

Teleworking Safely: Precautions for Working Remotely during COVID-19

COVID-19 Teleworking Safety Tips

As we cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to take a few extra measures to protect your organization, your patients and clients, and your data. Teleworking, where more and more individuals are working remotely, is widely accepted to prevent further spread of the virus. Now is a good time to address the risks that … Read more

What does the CCPA have to do with Policies & Procedures?

policies procedures CCPA

Compliance with CCPA is entwined with how you do business. Your business operations (the “how and what”) directly link to company policy, controls, processes: policies and procedures. You could say that the CCPA has everything to do with policies and procedures. Which is why you need to update yours – yesterday. Not convinced? Let’s go … Read more

How to lose data & money: The cost of unmitigated risk

why unmitigated risk

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The OCR announcement of a $4.3 million price tag on MD Anderson’s Cancer Center for noncompliance highlights the cost of unmitigated risk. A 2006 security risk analysis showing that a lack of encryption posed a PHI security threat prompted the Center to develop policies for portable device encryption. Smart. But then an OCR breach investigation … Read more