The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was enacted on August 21, 1996, as Public Law 104-191. HIPAA Administrative Simplification provisions in Subtitle F, Title II included transactions and code sets, privacy, security, and unique identifiers. Except for several identifiers, the federal government promulgated enabling regulations under the Administrative Procedure Act. For example, the Privacy Rule required compliance by healthcare providers, healthcare clearinghouses, and health plans—Covered Entities—by April 14, 2003, and the Security Rule required compliance by April 20, 2005, with small health plans for each rule having an additional year in which to comply. On February 17, 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and…
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OCR Reports 107 Breaches Affecting Over 4 Million Individuals (I)
As of the July 4th holiday weekend, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has updated again its Web site listing of breaches affecting 500 or more individuals. As of July 2, 2010, there were 107 breaches listed that were reported to have occurred between September 22, 2009 and June 11, 2010. Individuals affected by these publicly listed breaches totaled 4,086,980. Six of the 107 breaches, or 5.6% of the total, affected 3,353,627 individuals, or 82% of the total. This is the first of three postings that analyzes the data from these 107 breaches. This posting (I) covers electronic breaches, the next posting (II) covers hard copy (paper) breaches, and the…
Contingency Plan: Data Backup-What to Do and How to Do It
In our series on the HIPAA Administrative Simplification Security Rule, this is the first implementation specification for the Administrative Safeguard Standard (Contingency Plan). This implementation specification is required. As HIPAA.com has noted in earlier postings, with enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) on February 17, 2009, business associates also will be required to comply with the Security Rule standards, effective February 17, 2010. What to Do Establish and implement procedures to create and maintain retrievable exact copies of electronic protected health information. How to Do It Covered entities must backup electronic protected health information on a regular basis. When a computer system fails, it may…