Monitoring Legal Developments Relating to the Privacy and Security of Health Information
The recent changes to HIPAA brought about by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and its Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act have received a lot of attention, as of…
Continue Reading HIPAA Reminder Notice Due April 14th for Large Health Plans
The abandoned records of an Acton, Massachusetts physician who abruptly closed his office have been saved from the shredder by the last-minute intervention of a local hospital, highlighting a potential…
Continue Reading Massachusetts Hospital Rescues “Orphan” Medical Records
The Center for Democracy and Technology ("CDT") has released a great guidance document that compares the requirements under the newly-enacted HITECH Act against HIPAA, and highlights specific changes resulting from this new legislation. The CDT guidance document…
Today, President Obama signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (known as the "HITECH Act") into law. The final version of HITECH Act is posted on…
Continue Reading HITECH Act Signed Into Law – High Hopes Follow
The Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights has posted its new Web site, and reports that the health information privacy pages have been "extensively revised to improve organization and…
The Center for Democracy and Technology ("CDT") released a major policy paper today that is intended to move the health privacy debate to consider more effective privacy protection of patient…
Continue Reading Will Federal Privacy Requirements Be Getting More Stringent?
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has published a new HIPAA Privacy Rule guidance as part of its "Privacy and Security Toolkit" (the "Toolkit") developed in…
Today, OCR posted a new response to the FAQ "Is the HIPAA Privacy Rule suspended during a national or public health emergency?" The federal government’s answer? . . . NO! The …
It’s been years since HIPAA became a household term. Yet, there continues to be a significant amount of confusion about when it applies, what types of uses and disclosures of PHI are …
At the end of June, Investor’s Business Daily reported that Google, Microsoft, Aetna, Blue Cross/ and 27 other private organizations "agreed on" ground rules for protecting the privacy of the sensitive information" c
ontained in …
Continue Reading Best Practices for HealthVault and Google Health
