HCPro.com: Briefings on HIPAA

How can you minimize the impact of HIPAA? Subscribe to Briefings on HIPAA, your health information management resource for complying with information privacy & security regulations. Get help with rewriting contracts with business partners, telling patients about how their information is being used, and establishing privacy-conscious business practices.

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July 2008 (Volume 8, Issue 7)	view entire issue

HIPAA housekeeping: Focus on these periodic tasks to ensure compliance success
You wouldn't drive your car to work every day without performing regular oil changes, or let dirt accumulate in your home without periodic cleanings. Similarly, your organization's privacy and security efforts call for regular tune-ups and housekeeping. Yet this is an area of weakness for many covered entities. After initial efforts to comply with the privacy and security rules in 2003 and 2005, a relaxed enforcement environment that lasted for years encouraged organizations to divert resources to more pressing concerns.

Train your environmental services staff on HIPAA
Editor's note: The following is the third article in a series about how to effectively train specific groups of staff members on HIPAA privacy and security compliance. Just like your clinical staff members, your environmental staff works inside your hospital 24 hours per day. Whether serving food in the cafeteria, providing custodial or housekeeping services, or performing a variety of other tasks, environmental services staff members are part of the hospital fabric. They are simply less visible than those wearing white coats.

Q&A: Releasing information to other providers
Editor's note: Brandt is president of Brandt & Associates, Inc., a healthcare consulting firm in Bellaire, TX. She is a nationally recognized expert on patient privacy, information security, and regulatory compliance, and her publications provided some of the basis for HIPAA's privacy regulations. She is also the former director of policy and research for the American Health Information Management Association.

HIPAA and the modern blended, extended family
Protecting patient information has always been challenging. But these days, it's downright maddening. The major obstacles remain the same. But now, healthcare facilities must also respond to the challenge of responding to requests for information from patients' blended families-a club that seems to add new members every day. Because more than half of marriages in the United States end in divorce, the lines that separate authorized and unauthorized disclosures are increasingly blurred.

Other recently-published articles from Briefings on HIPAA:

Q&A: Children in office, cell phone use, and more

Redemtec offers solid asset management

BA agreements: Prevent problems and eliminate loopholes

Protect your patients and avoid an audit

2009 HIPAA forecast

Home secure home: Mitigate remote access risks

Q&A: Breach notification, secure e-mail, and more

Certified career boosters: How credentials help you

Honeypots: A sweet tool for monitoring snooping

Lax enforcement? Not under the OIG’s watch

Flag identity theft as federal rule takes effect

Q&A: Handle flower deliveries, media requests, and more

Disaster preparedness: Design, update, practice your plan

Confront release of information challenges

Trust in CellTrust’s Mobile Healthcare Solution messaging

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