As most healthcare providers know, HIPAA requires that covered entities or business associates  conduct an accurate and thorough assessment of the potential risks and vulnerabilities to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information (“ePHI”) held by the covered entity or business associate.[1] Providers who receive Meaningful Use incentive payments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) for implementing electronic health record (“EHR”) systems into their practices or operations are also likely aware of the fact that one of the many requirements for these incentive payments is to conduct a HIPAA security risk analysis annually. Now, perhaps more than ever before, both CMS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) is demonstrating the importance of ensuring that these risk analyses are performed, or providers can face dire consequences. Below are the top reasons to conduct a thorough HIPAA security risk analysis.
Continue Reading Top 5 Reasons to Conduct a Thorough HIPAA Security Risk Analysis

Cancer Care Group, P.C. settled alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules on September 2 with the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for $750,000. Cancer Care, a radiation oncology private physician practice located in Indiana, also agreed to adopt a corrective action plan to remedy defects in its HIPAA compliance program.
Continue Reading $750K HIPAA settlement highlights importance of risk analysis, device control policy

The Anthem breach sent alarm waves through the health care industry and the employer health plan community. With 78.8 million affected individuals for Anthem and 11 million for the companion breach of Premera Blue Cross, the combined size ranks among the largest data breaches in history.

The Anthem and Premera breaches signal a sea change in the threat environment for health plans, a new reality that requires a fresh look at data security. Prudent employers with group health plans should take that fresh look now, by strengthening the data security provisions in their business associate agreements (BAAs) with third-party plan administrators, and also by updating their HIPAA-required security risk assessments.
Continue Reading Data Security for Employer Health Plans Post-Anthem

It’s a dangerous world for protected information, with major breaches in the news and a challenging cyber-threat environment behind the scenes. The healthcare industry is a prime target, especially given the premium value of health information on the black market. And healthcare entities face not only PHI breach exposures, but also security risks for other forms of protected information, such as PII and, for many, cardholder data.

Healthcare organizations must be prepared to respond to data breaches, but effective response is no small matter. There are 10 different channels of response activity for an organization that has suffered a security breach: Security, Legal, Forensic, Law Enforcement, Regulators, Insurance Coverage, Public Relations, Stakeholders, Notification, and Personnel Management. Most of these activities are involved in every breach, and all must be dealt with in significant breaches. These activities are not sequential. They play out in parallel, with interrelated effects… and with the response clock ticking.
Continue Reading The 10 Key Activities for Effective Data Breach Response – Are You Prepared?

Because the healthcare community relies upon encryption to safeguard e-Protected Health Information (ePHI), vulnerability to the underlying security of any encryption code is potentially devastating.

The Heartbleed computer bug is gaining substantial media coverage recently, and for good reason. Organizations, especially those in healthcare, should pay special attention to risks from the bug. Heartbleed is not a computer virus, but is actually a software defect. The defect went unnoticed for a long period of time, and was unfortunately adopted by many websites.

Discovered by Neel Mehta of Google Security, the Heartbleed bug is based on a fault in functionality in the widely used OpenSSL library. This library is used by security vendors’ products to secure web browsing and even mobile banking applications. For example, if you go to a site like Amazon, you may notice a little lock in the browser section of the bar with the letters “https”– that is a sign that the website uses, and is a part of, the OpenSSL library. When the Heartbleed bug is exploited, the attacker can retrieve memory, up to 64KB from the remote system.  Such information may contain usernames, passwords, keys or other useful information that enables bigger attacks.
Continue Reading Healthcare organizations can take steps to mitigate Heartbleed impact