I’m sure fellow bloggers Bill Maruca and Michael Kline join me in giving three cheers for the recent growth in our firm’s health care practice (welcome, Minneapolis!) and ever-deepening pool of attorneys dealing with clients’ privacy and data security issues. But one recent addition to our team, Margaret (“Margie”) Davino, gets a fourth cheer for jumping into her new position as a partner practicing out of our New York City and Princeton, NJ offices and immediately leading a HIPAA webinar for HFMA’s Region 2 (metro NY) entitled “HIPAA: What to Expect in 2016”.

Margie covered a wide range of HIPAA topics, discussing how OCR investigations arise, preparing for Phase 2 of OCR’s audits, and how HIPAA might overlap or interplay with other laws (the FTC Act, state law causes of action, and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, to name a few). For HIPAA nerds like me, it was a satisfying smorgasbord of HIPAA tidbits, past, present and future.  But several of Margie’s take-aways are particularly useful additions to the 2016 HIPAA compliance “To-Do” list:

  1. Make sure your security risk analysis encompasses all entities within your “family” – in other words, don’t just analyze your electronic health record, but focus on each entity and location from which protected health information (PHI) might be stolen or lost.
  2. If you are a small entity, make use of HHS’s Security Risk Assessment Tool to identify whether corrective action should be taken in a particular area. (In other words, there’s no excuse for ignoring item #1 on this list!)
  3. Encrypt data, if at all possible (and make sure it’s up to NIST encryption standards).
  4. Check that you have updated Business Associate (BA) Agreements in place for all BA relationships (and check first to make sure it’s really a BA relationship).
  5. Have a mobile device policy – and include mobile devices in your security risk analysis.

I like this short “To-Do” list because it helps prioritize HIPAA compliance tasks for 2016 based on what we have learned from breaches and enforcement actions in 2015 and prior years.