Employee Privacy in a Pandemic COVID-19 has presented businesses with a new challenge in keeping their company safe and it starts with employee health. As they re-open in the wake of the pandemic, they must keep track of individual health with regard to who is sick and how it might affect the company as a...
Let’s Recap The Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA) was created in 1996 to protect patients and their privacy, and if you are in healthcare, you already know this and are familiar with what it means. With a goal to ensure that people could maintain health insurance between jobs, thus the “Portability” part of...
The Patients Are Not Equal As COVID-19 took over in the headlines, it also took over at many hospitals around the country. We saw a rise in the number of patients that were taken in and diagnosed with the virus, but there was an unexpected result as well. The rate of decline in-patient activity didn’t...
In mid-March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that they would use “enforcement discretion” in regard to HIPAA compliance with telehealth. And, the healthcare community gave out a collective sigh of relief. Not because the rules and regulations were unfair, but in a time of...
While we have all had to adjust in obvious ways to the pandemic, the reality is that after the panic subsides, and after the immediate emergency vibe in the air passes, we will never return to the way things once were. We are in a new reality, or as many keep saying, a new normal....
COVID-19 has given us a type of Fashion Week within healthcare, where new trends and rising stars emerge unexpectedly, and all at an alarmingly fast pace down the virtual runway. We are seeing work from home take on a whole new significance, which leads to new software platforms rising in popularity, existing applications modified to...
We find ourselves months into the trenches of the COVID-19 crisis, and with each new day comes not only a different set of problems but new solutions as well. As first responders, public safety officers, and the medical community continue to show the need to increase hires within their fields, the process to make those...
We’ve all had to make adjustments to how we work, how we live, and how we interact overall with humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that we’ve been stricter in some regard, and more relaxed in others (limiting screen time, who can be bothered?). The government is no exception to this. We’ve seen some...
HIPAA provides guidelines to establish the permissible use of an individual’s personal health information (PHI). Seems pretty straightforward for the most part. And it was – for the most part. Until we start to dig a little deeper and look at the resources that are now in play (which were not 20+ years ago when...
Community-Based Testing & HIPAA Community-Based Testing Sites (CBTS) are the latest entity to be excluded from HIPAA enforcement penalties by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for their participation in regard to COVID-19 specimen collection and testing. This “exercise of enforcement discretion is effective immediately (April 9, 2020), but has a retroactive effect to March...
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