From OCR to AI The Future of Media and Image Analysis in eDiscovery
HHS Office for Civil Rights Director Melanie Fontes Rainer on Progress and News at OCR
ERISA Blog | Changes to the HIPAA Privacy Rules A Primer for Self-Insured Group Health Plans
Podcast - Data Privacy and Tracking Technology Compliance
Patient Data and Privacy
2022 DSIR Deeper Dive: OCR’s Right of Access Initiative
HIPAA Tips With Williams Mullen - Telehealth After the Pandemic
Relaxed HIPAA Restrictions For Providers Using Telehealth
Webinar: Investigating and Resolving Sexual Assaults on Campus
In today’s healthcare environment, compliance is a defining element of patient care quality, operational integrity, and public trust. Oversight from agencies such as the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Centers for Medicare...more
Report on Patient Privacy 23, no. 11 (November, 2023) The American Hospital Association (AHA) is urging federal lawmakers to intervene with the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) so that hospitals and health systems can...more
Government regulators are seemingly as numerous as the stars nowadays, especially in the universe of data incidents. When organizations experience a data incident, they will need to quickly assess what happened, why it...more
On July 20, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) and the Office for Civil Rights of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (“OCR”) announced that they had sent a warning letter to about 130 hospital...more
Report on Patient Privacy 22, no. 6 (June, 2022) - A report from the HHS Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) found that in early 2022, ransomware groups increasingly turned to legitimate software during...more
CYBERSECURITY - GAO Report Identifies Need for DOE to Address Risks to Electrical Distribution System - The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently completed and published a study on electricity...more
Report on Patient Privacy 18, no. 1 (January 2021) - The HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) settled its 13th enforcement action in its Right of Access Initiative, first announced in 2019 to support individuals’ rights to...more
CYBERSECURITY - HHS Issues Update to Ransomware Threat Alert to Health Care Sector - The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) issued a health care and public...more
Report on Patient Privacy 20, no. 11 (November 2020) - In her 14-plus years of investigating and blogging about hacking and breaches, “Dissent” has been yelled at, threatened with lawsuits and accused of being a criminal....more
CYBERSECURITY - Patching Gets More and More Complicated but Is Critical for Managing Risk - Patching vulnerabilities has always been challenging, but these days, it is getting more and more complicated as...more
CYBERSECURITY - VA Alerting 46,000 Veterans of Compromise - The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Management (VA) has announced that it is notifying approximately 46,000 veterans that their personal...more
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced on April 2 that HHS is exercising its enforcement discretion to permit business associates to use and disclose protected health information (PHI) for public health...more
Natural Gas Compressor Facility Shut Down After Ransomware Attack - The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced this week that a ransomware attack shut down a natural gas compressor facility for two days. While in...more
On January 28, 2020, the Department of Health & Human Services (“HHS”) Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) addressed a federal court’s January 23rd invalidation of certain provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and...more
Researchers at Sentinel One and Dragos have detected malicious code, called EKANS or Snake, that has been designed specifically to target industrial control systems (ICS), including those of oil refineries, manufacturing...more
Editors’ Note: This is the fourth in our fourth-annual end-of-year series examining important trends in data privacy and cybersecurity in the coming year. Our previous entry discussed the CCPA, energy, and Brexit. Up next:...more
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services imposed a $1.6 million civil money penalty (CMP) against the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, Department of Aging and Disability...more
Every year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) jointly sponsor a conference to “address the dynamic and challenging...more
On May 24, 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a new fact sheet which lists the provisions of the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Breach Notification, and Enforcement Rules (HIPAA)...more
In a development that may – understandably – have been overlooked by many heading into Memorial Day weekend, on May 24, 2019, the Health and Human Service’s (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a Fact Sheet on Direct...more
We previously reported that Cottage Health, a health care entity operating several hospitals in California, settled with the State of California for $2 million for a security incident that occurred in 2013. On February 7,...more
Your Organization’s best defense in an environment of aggressive regulators and litigious plaintiffs’ counsel is the completion of an enterprise risk assessment. Regulators and attorneys general are fining–sometimes hundreds...more
Data privacy and security legislation and enforcement saw significant activity in 2018 and early 2019. McDermott’s 2018 Digital Health Year in Review: Focus on Data report – the first in a four-part series – highlights...more
A Florida staffing agency which provides physicians to hospitals and nursing homes, has agreed to a $500,000 settlement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights. The settlement comes...more
Regulators provided key insights into enforcement trends and potential changes to HIPAA regulations at the 11th Annual “Safeguarding Health Information: Building Assurance Through HIPAA Security” conference in October...more