HIPAA Privacy

There is a great deal of social change underway in terms of how we collect, use, and share information about organizations and people.  Privacy seems to be threatened from all sides by many forms of compromise:  from cyber criminals seeking to exploit personal information for gain, to we ourselves sharing our own stories through Social Media across the World-Wide Web.  Certainly, today there is more information “out there” than ever before, and this is cause for concern. One of the areas where control is being enforced is over patient information:  how it is to be shared, who can have access, what [...]

Raleigh, N.C.—The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has recently announced that the Raleigh Orthopedic Clinic of North Carolina has agreed to pay $750,000 in settlement fees. The clinic faced charges that it had potentially violated HIPAA privacy rules. The “potential violation” as released by the OCR is meant to obfuscate the role the Raleigh Clinic had in its infraction of HIPAA privacy rules, the company unequivocally broke the law. The violation occurred when the Raleigh clinic handed over the protected health information of approximately 17,300 patients to a potential business associate without first executing a business [...]