• Recently Written

  • Software update prevents users Brabeion RoHS
  • If our government to give free insurance?
  • Patient data are never really safe?
  • Importance of dog insurance in the life of your pet
  • Drug HIPA A friendly service Transcript
  • The importance of life insurance for your pet dog
  • If our government is giving away free insurance?
  • If our government is giving away free insurance?
  • Label
  • Health cards

• Categories

  • Healthcare Industry News
  • HIPAA
  • HIPAA (General)
  • HIPAA Compliance
  • HIPAA Compliant Software
  • HIPAA Enforcement
  • HIPAA Jobs
  • HIPAA Law
  • HIPAA Lawsuits
  • HIPAA News
  • HIPAA Privacy
  • HIPAA Regulation
  • HIPAA Security
  • HIPAA Technology
  • HIPAA Training
  • Medical Privacy
  • Privacy News
  • Sarbanes-Oxley

• Archives

  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • January 2009
  • September 2008
  • June 2008
  • April 2008
  • August 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004

• Admin

  • Log in
  • Wordpress
  • XHTML

• Search

Sharing personal healthiness data over the web could be a dangerous business. Unluckily, as individuals turn out to be familiar to making major in case not all of their private business on-line, the demand for accessing that data on-line will develop to the point that healthiness care providers will have no selection but to either supply admission to that personal healthiness data or lose their consumers.

The Healthiness Insurance Portability and Responsibility Act (HIPAA) were enacted to guarantee the confidentiality of patient data. That needs that healthiness care providers occupy stringent measures to guarantee that data shared on the web is defended from unauthorized admission.

The HIPAA Act needs healthiness-providing entities to:

* Allocate liability for safety to a individual or company.
* Assess safety risks and establish the main threats to the safety and secrecy of defended healthiness data.
* Set up a program to address physical safety, workers safety, technical safety controls, and safety event answer and disaster recovery.
* Confirm the efficiency of safety controls.
* Advance policies, practices and guiding principles for utilize of private computing tools (workstations, laptops, hand-held tools), and for assuring mechanisms are in spot that permit, limit and terminate admission (admission control lists, user accounts, and so on.) suitable to an individual’s status, change of status or termination.
* Implement admission controls that may incorporate encryption, background-based admission, function-based admission, or user-based admission; audit control mechanisms, information verification, and entity verification

That law has serious implications for businesses that permit unauthorized admission resulting in a break in confidentiality.

Safety is the key

Since the HIPAA law supplies for all social and illegal punishment for violations, information and admission safety is of
The utmost significance. To guarantee HIPAA compliance,
On-line document administration should incorporate several safety attributes:

* Secure internet server – a server running secure socket layers is the least required.
* Encrypted database – all information should be encrypted. Software is accessible that will encrypted all information transmitted among 2 PC over the web.
* Secure admission control — additionally to a customary user id and password, it may be a fine plan to utilize a powerful password or smart card as extra safety.
* Session timeout – that guarantees that secret information isn’t left on an unattended screen.
* Server monitoring – the secure internet server needs to be exactly monitored to notice smash-in attempts.
* Usual safety audits – usual audits are needed to make certain all safety precautions are working perfectly.
* Workers – system upkeep should be in the hands of met the criteria workers accustomed with HIPPA demands

HIPAA is the acronym for the Healthiness Insurance Portability and Responsibility Act of 1996, the first complete federal defensive act assuring the secrecy of patient’s private healthiness data. As part of HIPAA, Congress needed the advancement of secrecy rules to make sure the confidentiality of defended electronic healthiness records. The challenge of complying with more and more demanding authorities rules for example HIPAA was to mandate that healthcare data turn out to be portable and accessible “by legislating the utilization of uniform electronic transactions and different administrative measures.
This day, discovering HIPAA agreeable medicinal billing software may be critical but with excessive cost for little medicinal office. Big medicinal providers or medicinal billers that have by the said time put into practice powerful safety policies and practices, the HIPAA safety rules won’t impose extended change. The major terribly impacted structures will be little medicinal offices and billers that have weak safety policies and practices, which consequently, should experience an extended and expensive compliance attempt.

The HIPAA rules are divided in 4 sections:
1. Administrative Safeguards
2. Physical Safeguards
3. Safety Services
4. Safety Mechanisms
That piece of writing deals specially with the software safety rules. However, there’s no such thing as “HIPAA agreeable” software. The liability to be agreeable rests with the medicinal practice. Bear in mind that the term “HIPAA Compliance” refers to a medicinal practice obligation and not to a software technical specification. An instance of non-software rule is to placing workstations in secure spots (not in open or public areas), and orienting workstations to avoid viewing by no authorized workers.
2 key areas influenced by HIPAA are the medicinal billing software and the practice administration software. The HIPAA Safety rules mandate that in case defended healthiness data is stored or processed electronically, then the safety rule applies to that covered entity.

The key software HIPAA agreeable practices are:

A. Any medicinal billing software package should supply complete emergency plan. HIPAA needs all covered entities to keep up and routinely update a plan for responding to system crashes. The software should incorporate robust functions for:
1. Information backup.
2. Information restores.
B. Hippie needs all medicinal providers to take a complete look at how information is made, where stored, who could adapt it and who could delete it. The software should incorporate functions for:
1. Audit trails. Admission to information fields tracked and recorded.
2. Log Files. Such files supervise of changes made to the patient information in the program, and such changes could be viewed and printed by opening the audit trail analysis screens
3. Log in reports.
4. Monitoring the safety happening log of Windows-based computers.
C. Practices for determining and granting admission. It is means protected admission to patient’s information just to certified workers with:
1. Individual verification – individual logins and passwords.
2. Function Based Admission Control.
3. Automated-logoff attributes. That attribute will automatically log you out subsequent to the chosen sum of time of idleness. That avoids other people from reading your screen in case you have left your office with the application turned on.

It’s quite critical to examine all over on trial origin. Don’t entrust suppliers that don’t offer trial versions. In Biosoftworld, we offer full trial versions of our medicinal billing software. Subsequent to 30 days, the trial copy will simply end. There’s totally no obligation to buy.

With the internet being so widely use and easily accessed like it is now a days, using computers and the internet is no expection in the field of medicine. Doctors use it, nurses use it, and even the billing department in doctors offices and hospitals use it. In using online medicine there is certain types of software that is approved that can be used

Niner Niner, a collaborative weblog network, has over 25 great blogs and this “Best Of” highlights just a few of the posts that were written by some of the Niner authors, in topics that range from High Heels, Ajax, HIPAA Privacy Regulation to gadgets, books and health. 

     

In Ajax Blog, Sreejith introduces us to a few new things. First is Vox a new blogging service from Six Apart that uses WYSIWYG with a taste of web 2.0. After that we learn about Krun.ch and Wishlistr.

   

Blogging Naked: Scarification and lip plates are shown to be some of the newest and more popular form of “self-expression” in recent years.

Bookadoodle: Nancy Callahan posted more in her series “Getting Published” and this latest edition was part 5.

Boomer 2.0 had posts that pointed out that boomers can still have that second career and another that shows many are not even planning retirement anytime soon.

In Class Action Questions find out about lawsuits involving pyramid scams, hair raising beauty product claims and why State Farm was penalized.

Credit Cardenza: Unfortunately, millions of people are drowning in  credit card debt, have to worry about credit scams and fraud, and let’s not even talk about the international fees.

  

Dealsneak managed to sneak more than a few deals pass us this summer including, the Samsonite laptop case, a gorgeous leather bench, and a sweet looking Thermaltake Tsunami computer case.

Feed Money discusses the fact the Ebay has jumped on the contextual ad bandwagon as well as blog feeds and a program called RSS To Blog.

If you need to Fix Your Finances one of the first steps is learning how to save your money. After that you can check out Mvelopes to learn all about budgets.

At Games For Money you can find places to play free online gambling games and also learn some card counting tricks and tips.

  

The High Heels Blogs show us which killer heels are on sale including boots, sandals, slides and mules. Also take a look at some killer wedding heels for this summers nuptials.

 

A few notable gadgets that were blogged in the HyperGadget blog were the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, and the jumbled and messy looking organizer.

Over at the Medcare Forum, Kathleen Milazzo tells us more about that scary mad cow disease and our medical privacy laws.

Find out just how much house you can afford before you go running off to get that mortgage. And is the housing bubble really ready to blow? All this and more in Mortgage Updates.

At My Secret Side Biz learn how to make a profit, how to get your own powerwash, and simple business and Ebay tips.

On Healthy Living: Sarah White tells us all about a new study that could help with asthma reduction when it comes to do light exercise that involves stead breathing like yoga.

On Movies has a decade of super heroes list that includes recent and unreleased movies. Leafworks reviewed The Omen and we got to see the trailer for the new Ghost Rider movie.

Powersellers Blog: Ebay has done it. They finally reached 200 million members and they are also expanding into new ideas. Also people are fed up with Paypal while crooks are finding more ways to defraud your account.

Seo Updates: Yahoo one of the biggest email services was hit with a worm and Google expanded into real estate but won’t be making a browser, at least not anytime soon.

Get some free exercise tips from The Diet Logs. You will certainly need them if you plan to take a bite of this $100 burger.

Living the Single life? Well take a look at some great break up lines and if your looking to meet people Leafworks posted a great review of club La Rumba.

Thumb Gods: Nintendo is no, no to the name Wii for their new console a game system that is at the end of this long list containing The Evolution of Video Game Consoles.

Las Vegas Revealed that it was ill prepared for a massive disaster, but til then you can still get married and get comp’d in Vegas.

 

Wander the World, well the State of Colorado with Leafworks. He takes us to the Cherry Blossom Festival, Gothnic in Denver, Old Colorado City, Plaza del Arte Festival in Downtown Denver and Garden of the Gods.

Brabeion Software has updated their products with a new software called Brabeion Compliance Center 6.0. It allows users to keep up with regulatory compliance.

“With the addition of these regulatory modules, Chevron is better positioned to more proactively manage, deploy, and mitigate ongoing compliance efforts for SOX, HIPAA and other global regulatory requirements,” said Jay White, Global Information Protection Architect, Chevron. “Never before have we been able to implement easily and quickly such a comprehensive solution across our widely distributed information assets for compliance with external and internal regulations and security protocols.”

Brabeion Compliance Center is designed to significantly decrease the time and cost of implementing an IT compliance program, while providing unparalleled support for specific government and industry regulations. The solution includes modules for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Healthcare Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Federal Information Systems Management Act (FISMA), the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), California SB 1386 and NIST 800-53. Brabeion Software plans to launch additional modules later this year.

Source: Thomas Net

Configuresoft makes software that helps clients manage their technology and privacy concerns. This software can audit and monitor both your hardware and software allowing you to spend your time elsewhere. Configuresoft has now updated this already impressive software.

Colorado Springs-based ConfigureSoft has upgraded its Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) software. The firm said yesterday that its latest version, 4.8, of its software tool adds a new dashboard capability, better support for operating system platforms, including new 64-bit Windows, and cross-platform toolkits for various compliance regulations. Configuresoft’s software is used for monitoring IT infrastructure for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), HIPAA, and other regulations.

Source: Tech Rockies

Just catching up on a bit of HIPAA / Healthcare / Privacy news of late.

Seems IBM announced that it was acquiring Healthlink, the largest U.S. consulting firm dedicated to the health-care industry.

Rochelle Garner of CRN reports:

IBM announced Tuesday that it will buy Healthlink, the largest U.S. consulting firm dedicated to the health-care industry. The acquisition gives IBM Global Services the domain expertise of Healthlink’s 550-person professional organization, including 300 physicians, nurses and pharmacists. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is the second in one week in which a large IT consulting company acquired the health-care expertise of another. Last week, Accenture paid $175 million to buy the U.S. health-care practice of Capgemini. The 600 North American employees of Europe’s largest consulting company will join Accenture’s Health and Life Sciences practice in North America, the companies said. Paris-based Capgemini will retain its outsourcing contracts with U.S. health-care clients as well as continue health-care consulting in the federal public sector.

A Linux news site is reporting:

Ecora has released Enterprise Auditor version 3.6 that includes its new HIPAA Report Pack, a collection of more than 150 pre-built report definitions that address the technical and administrative safeguards of the HIPAA security standard.

“The manual process of preparing for a HIPAA security audit is time consuming, resource intensive, and prohibits sustainability, said Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of Ecora. “When organizations look at technology for compliance, they need to consider automated solutions such as our Enterprise Auditor that can cost-effectively help them maintain compliance in a repeatable and sustainable manner.”

Read more here

Well, the deadline to complete the security requirements of HIPAA passed yesterday with little fanfare.

Internet News has the scoop:

“Considering everything that is involved with compliance, there are a lot of factors as to why some companies may not have completed it,” Earl Crane, a senior consultant with Foundstone Professional Services, said. Foundstone, a subsidiary of McAfee, is a leading HIPAA consultant and security software provider.

Some scary compliance stats:

However, a study from Information Technology Solution Providers Alliance shows that only 30 percent of health plans and 18 percent of health care providers in the SMB market are in compliance with the regulations.

“They’ve got their own fires to put out,” Crane said. “It doesn’t happen out of laziness but rather a crunch for resources,” he said.

Read more here

Techweb reports:

Enforcement of the security regulations–like earlier HIPAA rules for privacy–will be complaint-driven, he says. Since the HIPAA privacy regulations, which identify what personal health information needs to be protected, took effect two years ago this month, there have been nearly 11,000 complaints filed to the federal government by patients and others. As of January, about 62% of those privacy-violation complaints had been resolved, according to CMS. The others are still being processed or have been turned over to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.

Interesting survey stats:

A survey conducted earlier this year by Privacy and American Business and Harris Interactive showed that 70% of Americans are concerned that their personal health information could be disclosed because of weak data security, and 69% think electronic health records could result in the sharing of their health information without their knowledge. Sixty-five percent think patients will withhold information from doctors because of those concerns.

Some background on HIPAA, and Bush’s goals for electronic medical records:

HIPAA, which was passed by Congress in 1996, was written before the more recent federal push to have the health industry replace paper-based patient files with digital records. The Bush administration last year set a goal for most Americans to have electronic health records by 2014. The government estimates that billions of dollars can be saved annually in the United States by widespread IT deployments that can help reduce medical errors, costs, and waste.

Here at HIPAA Blog, we learn new acronyms on a nearly daily basis (okay, maybe weekly).

Apparently Sarbanes-Oxley is now affectionately referred to as SOX.

GLBA? That’s short for the Gramm Leach Bliley Act.

Hopefully our longtime readers know what HIPAA stands for, but if you’re new to this business, HIPAA stands for:
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

Windows IT Pro magazine has a blurb about Vigilar, which just launched a new feature called AuditPass. Vigilar even has a money-back guarantee that your company will pass compliance and audit checks. Sounds good to me!

Mark Joseph Edwards of Windows IT Pro magazine:

Vigilar announced a new service aimed at helping companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). A compelling feature of Vigilar’s new AuditPass program is that they offer a money-back guarantee that your company will pass compliance and audit checks.

“[A]n organization-wide, systematic approach is critical in sustaining compliance quarter after quarter, which not only minimizes the overall cost of compliance, but also ensures that the entire organization is in compliance and consistently stays ahead of regulatory requirements and deadlines,” said Vigilar President and CEO, Palaniswamy Rajan.

Read more here

Nice article by Bruce Schneier, once again confirming that he is an excellent thinker when it comes to network security issues.

Thinking about implementing 2-factor authentication as part of your HIPAA-compliance strategy? Don’t rely too much on this technique, since attackers are beginning to actively target valuable information in ways that defeat 2-factor authentication.

Two-Factor Authentication: Too Little, Too Late

Unfortunately, the nature of attacks has changed over those two decades. Back then, the threats were all passive: eavesdropping and offline password guessing. Today, the threats are more active: phishing and Trojan horses.

Here are two new active attacks we’re starting to see:

Man-in-the-Middle Attack. An attacker puts up a fake bank website and entices user to that website. User types in his password, and the attacker in turn uses it to access the bank’s real website. Done right, the user will never realize that he isn’t at the bank’s website. Then the attacker either disconnects the user and makes any fraudulent transactions he wants, or passes along the user’s banking transactions while making his own transactions at the same time.

Trojan attack. Attacker gets Trojan installed on user’s computer. When user logs into his bank’s website, the attacker piggybacks on that session via the Trojan to make any fraudulent transaction he wants.

See how two-factor authentication doesn’t solve anything? In the first case, the attacker can pass the ever-changing part of the password to the bank along with the never-changing part. And in the second case, the attacker is relying on the user to log in.

The real threat is fraud due to impersonation, and the tactics of impersonation will change in response to the defenses. Two-factor authentication will force criminals to modify their tactics, that’s all.

HIPAA Regulations Force Medical Practices to Reconsider Email and Web Communications

Hagerstown, MD (PRWEB) March 5, 2005 — The latest updates to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) call for health care providers to adopt secure communication practices to protect Patient Identifiable Data. While not specific as to which technologies should be used, HIPAA does require physicians and health care providers to examine their use of email and online communication and take appropriate measures to ensure that private information is not compromised. Until recently, this meant implementing an expensive secure server or Virtual Private Network (VPN) solutions, or avoiding the use of email and online communication altogether. Recent software developments and innovations, however, have put HIPAA-compliant email and web solutions within reach of the small health-care provider and physician practice.

DatAchieve Digital is introducing ArticSoft’s FormsAssurity product to its suite of medical web development solutions. Unlike earlier security solutions, FormsAssurity encrypts both web-based email and web inquiry forms on the user’s desktop level, before any information is ever sent over the Internet or stored on a server. “We’re excited about the possibilities this offers both physicians and patients,” said David Layton, Director of Business Operations for DatAchieve. “Many small practices have their hands tied when it comes to using email to communicate with patients or staff, and it can be frustrating for a patient to be unable to request a prescription refill or schedule an appointment from their family doctor’s web site.” “FormsAssurity will enable us to offer that convenience to both patients and physicians.”

More HIPAA technology solutions on the horizon for sure…

Via PRWeb

If you’ve installed Google’s new desktop search tool, you might want to consider the security issues of having software that caches SSL-encrypted traffic specifically so it can be rapidly and easily searched. This has clear implications for administrators responsible for maintaining HIPAA-secure information technology.

InfoWorld: SSL VPN security threatened by desktop search engines: November 12, 2004: By Tim Greene, Network World Fusion : SECURITY

New PC indexing tools such as Google (Profile, Products, Articles) Desktop Search pose security risks to businesses that use SSL remote access because the tools copy material accessed during SSL sessions and make it available to unauthorized people who later use the same PC.

Read entire article

(Via HIPAA Clicks – HIPAA RSS feeds)

Looks like there is a free trial download for this product. Might be worth checking out if you’re a small operation in need of a low-cost solution. We haven’t tried this or evaluated it, so this is just a heads-up — another company advertising solutions for HIPAA compliance, this time with potentially a pretty reasonable price tag.

PRESS RELEASE: $99 HIPAA Compliance Automated Software Product Introduced by 3DGrid

$99 HIPAA Compliance Automated Software Product Introduced by 3DGrid

HIPAA Checkup Essentials — Low Cost product created by the leading HIPAA compliance solution provider for small and medium sized practices.

SEATTLE (PRWEB) October 18, 2004 — 3DGrid, Inc., the leading provider of HIPAA compliance solutions for small and medium sized healthcare practices, today announced the launch of HIPAA Checkup Essentials, a tool that provides essential HIPAA compliance resources for $99.

The tool is a sophisticated primer designed to help practices begin to meet their HIPAA Security compliance requirements. HIPAA Checkup Essentials is designed for practices that are unsure of how much or how little they might need to do for the forthcoming HIPAA Security Rule, but are willing to do some of the basics to get started. The product can be upgraded to the full HIPAA Checkup Suite with minimal effort and cost.

“We built HIPAA Checkup Essentials for the small practice that is unsure of its obligation under the HIPAA Security Rule, but wants to make sure to cover the basics. If the practice comes to understand the value of a fully automated compliance solution, we will upgrade them to the HIPAA Checkup Suite in a seamless fashion.” said Tobin Arthur President and CEO of 3DGrid.

HIPAA Checkup Essentials is now the premier HIPAA compliance product on the market under $100. The product was developed in response to requests by some practices that just wanted the essential form and policy templates needed to get their HIPAA documentation underway.

About 3DGrid Healthcare Solutions
3DGrid Healthcare Solutions is a Seattle-based software development firm dedicated to cost-effectively delivering Fortune 500-quality technologies to the small and medium sized healthcare practice environment. The 3DGrid team is focused on reducing practice risk while giving providers more time %u2026 time to generate more revenue or time to live life to the fullest. HIPAA Checkup does this by helping doctors and administrators of small to medium sized practices achieve compliance quickly, with relative ease and minimal expense. For more information, please contact 3DGrid at telephone 866-3DGrid-1 or visit us online at www.3DGrid.com.

Contact:
3DGrid
1952 1st Ave. South #3
Seattle, WA 98134
Tel (206) 568.3434
Fax (206) 464.9993
Web www.3dgrid.com

Next Page →

• Featured Links

Resources

Lasoo Online Catalogues

Asbestos Compensation

wholesale beauty

Links

• HIPAA Book
• HIPAA Jobs
• HIPAA News
• HIPAAClicks.com
• HIPAAdvisory
• The HIPAA Summit
• US Gov’s HIPAA Site

Meta

• Log in
• Entries RSS
• Comments RSS
• WordPress.org