EHR

Particle Health filed a federal antitrust lawsuit claiming that EPIC is blocking access to patient records.  The lawsuit states that Epic is using its power to eradicate competition in the Healthcare Marketplace.

"The doctors in our practice request patients to text or email them photos of their various foot conditions and post-op P&As to their personal mobile phones. We know this is not HIPAA compliant. What is a better way to handle these situations?"

There are four different methods to submit your data to Registry Clearinghouse; manual entry, spreadsheets, submit through billing company or directly through EHR. These four methods are detailed.

For 2024, there are 11 new measures and 9 measures that have been retired.

Understand the implications working from home or remote access has on maintaining HIPAA compliance in the office.

On April 27th, an EHR system company sent an email to hosted customers detailing a ransomware incident. According to the email, "A sophisticated criminal organization carried out a ransomware attack on some of the hosting vendor’s systems, disaster recovery site, and backups." As a result of this outage, many customers lost access to their EHR system.

New Haven, Connecticut failed to terminate an employee’s access to their Health Records System after the employee left. The former employee may have accessed a file containing the Protected Health Information of only 498 Patients.

When we discuss HIPAA most of the articles have been on security and breaches, but HIPAA goes well beyond privacy and Security.  One aspect of the HIPAA rule is the “Right of Access”.   OCR (The Office for Civil Rights – the branch of HHS the enforces HIPAA) is enforcing this law even more strongly since the 21 Century Cures Act was published.  OCR has begun to levy fines against organizations that are in violation of the “Right of Access” rule.

Under the new law known as the 21st Century Cures Act, information blocking is now ILLEGAL. That means if you get a request from another provider for patient information, you are required to provide that information. The Office of Inspector General at OIG can investigate all claims of information blocking by providers and can levy fines and / or enforce Corrective Action Plans (CAP).