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Medical Records Briefing Strategies for Health Care Compliance

”The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) strongly supports the concept of extending privacy protection to patient data held by all organizations, not just the organizations that are currently covered by federal privacy regulations,” Jill Callahan Dennis, senior vice president of public and industry leadership for AHIMA, said in a March 31 letter to the editor of The New York Times.

Dennis said in her letter than the paper’s March 26 editorial makes an important point about the need to provide identifiable patient information greater protection against security and confidentiality breaches. “The impact of a breach of confidentiality can be serious, and distinctions between the kinds of organizations holding the data are largely meaningless from the patient’s viewpoint,” she wrote.

”It is important for us to enforce the privacy rules that were created under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act,” she wrote. “There must be consequences for those who break the rules. We urge the Department of Health and Human Services to act on these recommendations as soon as possible.”

Click here to read the letter to the editor in The New York Times.