|
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has posted a notice of final rule in the Jan. 28 Federal Register requiring each state to adopt a system to report certain adverse licensure actions taken against licensed healthcare practitioners to the Secretary of HHS, effective March 1.
Connecticut Attorney General (AG) Richard Blumenthal announced Wednesday that he is suing Health Net of Connecticut for failing to secure private patient medical records and financial information involving 446,000 Connecticut enrollees and promptly notify consumers exposed by the security breach.
Computer scientists from Kansas State University (KSU) are in the process of developing tools to strengthen the security of information systems, including those that hold patient medical records and other sensitive information.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has awarded health information management nonprofit, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Foundation, a $48,000 research development conference grant to lead a two-day summit, based on a project to improve health services research agenda to leverage health IT in rural America.
Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Hospital in Bellflower, Calif., has been fined $250,000 for unauthorized employee access to the medical records of Nadya Suleman, the woman who gave birth to octuplets in January this year.
While Virginia state officials said there is no evidence that personal information was stolen by hackers who accessed a computer system that collects data on approximately 8.3 million patients, the State Police and the FBI have launched a formal investigation into the matter.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Friday published a guidance targeting technologies and methodologies to secure health information by rendering health data unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals, as required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
|
Last month an external electronic data storage device containing patient health information for approximately 15,500 Northern California members of health insurance company Kaiser Permanente was stolen from an employee’s car at the employee’s home in Sacramento, Calif.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius Thursday released the first U.S. strategy focused on protecting people’s health during a large-scale emergency by establishing priorities for government and non-government activities over the next four years.
Molina Healthcare of Long Beach, Calif., has deployed dataguise’s dgmasker and dgdiscover for data security in more than 100 training, development and testing environments.
Current interoperabilty information security standards limitations for health IT include minimum encryption standards, which are not being met by many of the 7,000 contributing entities, according to Michael Mellor, chief information security officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The University of California (UC) Berkeley began notifying students, alumni and others on May 8 that their personal information may have been stolen after learning in April that hackers had accessed restricted computer databases in its health services center.
Approximately 80 percent of U.S. hospitals are still not in compliance with federal Red Flags Rules that require businesses and organizations to create identity theft prevention programs, according to a survey of healthcare executives released by Identity Force.
The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) has unveiled the Common Security Framework, an IT-security framework designed for healthcare data loss prevention.
|
The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
During the Health IT Standards Committee meeting on Feb. 24 in Washington, D.C., the Clinical Operations Workgroup sought to gather comments on proposed recommendations on implementation specifications for content exchange, vocabulary and code set standards for the Interim Final Rule of meaningful use.
In 2006, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), a branch of the FDA, began examining the number of medical device reports they received. Over the past two years, the number of submitted reports has increased, sparking a demand for the CDRH to make a move to electronic reporting.
A new hospital breaking ground usually isn’t breaking news. But the vision of patient care at one new facility, tentatively named Palomar Medical Center West (PMC West), is currently illegal under California state law.