I have read up on HIPPA and from the information that I have received HIPPA is supposed to be enforced whether you are alive or deceased. If this is a fact how can doctors or any medical staff speak about your medical condition without your consent? Obviously, he could not have given his consent knowing that he is no longer with us. This brings up huge red flags for me.

For someone who has severe medical conditions. I have always wondered what if I went into a doctors office and knew the person behind the front desk or the nurse. And one night, that person is speaking to someone else in a related medical issue comes up with someone they know. Will that person forget for a second that my medical is confidential?

For the most part, I believe HIPPA is a good program that does try to keep your records confidential. Still, as we have seen with the Michael Jackson situation there a kinks that need to be sorted out.

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.

Only recently the Federal Trade Commission had their own breach, which was due to someone stealing a laptop from an employees vehicle. A lot of these problems seem to be happening because employees have laptops and private files with millions of data on hundreds of thousands of people and no one is doing a thing about it.

I really would have thought that companies would take a look at what’s happening and start changing the way information is handled when it comes to employees taking it with them.

I would take a large guess that until some of the information stolen belongs to a celebrity or someone in Congress, not a damn thing is going to be done. If you are one of the people affected I guess they will sing you the tune of too bad, so sad.

Wireless LAN’s are convenient and allows for portablity. However they are very dangerous when it comes to security because even with a password, some technical individuals can still break their way through the encryption.

Siemens Communications Inc. has announced today that they have released a modular extention called HiPath Wireless Manager Advanced (HWMA) that will improve wireless security with intrusion detection and prevention.

“The Siemens HiPath Wireless Manager Advanced platform helps enterprises improve network efficiencies, prevent network attacks and respond to security challenges,” said Stefan Miesbach, CEO of the HiPath Wireless Division at Siemens. “The HWMA solution is also an important part of Siemens’ vision to make enterprise mobility easy – including enterprise data networking as well as the emerging need for unified on-the-go communication across all mobile and vertical business applications.”

Via Wireless IQ

“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

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

“More than a decade ago, I had the opportunity to help shape the early health-care transaction standards that would one day become HIPAA. I worked on the American National Standards Institute’s X12 835 committee to define the first version of standard remittance advice, which is now a HIPAA standard. Back then, we could only imagine a time when the health-care industry would give up its paper processes and go electronic. Thanks to HIPAA and the hard work of several industry organizations, standardized formats finally arrived, and electronic-transaction usage increased as a direct result.”

“The Department of Justice now has the authority to pursue only violations of the most egregious nature—those that represent deliberate misuse of patient information. The penalties for lesser violations, such as inadvertent disclosures of health information, were set in the original HIPAA legislation and aren’t, at first glance, particularly onerous: a minimum of $100 per violation per year, and a maximum of $25,000 per year per violation. The real deterrent isn’t the fines themselves, but the bad publicity that befalls an organization when fines are imposed.”

Full Article

HIPPA covers breaches of health privacy by health plans and providers, but doesn’t say anything about other people who might access medical information such as medical transcribers hired by doctors or even hackers.

A new federal law would have to make sharing medical information a crime for anyone with access to that information. Experts urged that passing of a law to cover the database before that system is put in place, instead of trying to write a law to fit the new technology once it is already in place.

Right now there is a patchwork of state laws covering the privacy of medical records in addition to HIPPA. About 17,000 claims have been filed under HIPPA, but action has only been taken against one company.

Privacy advocates warn that a law that does not give patients the right of consent to say who can and cannot access their records will quickly erode the patients’ right to privacy. The right of consent was removed from HIPPA in 2002.

H.R. 4157 in Congress would establish a nationwide health infrastructure. It is much more complicated than the current system for tracking patient records and, as such, Blue Cross and Blue Shield has said the timetable for implementing the system as outlined in the bill is too ambitious.

For more on the bill before Congress, visit Thomas.

How much detail

A federal advisory panel on Tuesday issued a 14-point report of recommendations for what’s needed to develop, implement, and foster the secure nationwide exchange of electronic medical information.

The report was issued by the Commission on System Interoperability, which was created by Congress as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. The commission was charged with developing recommendations, priorities, and a timeline for implementing an electronic health information exchange network.

A nationwide healthcare system would be a ripe target for hackers. Let’s hope these recommendations are heeded by the Federal gov.

Not only could the suggestions reduce security threats, but also help save lives.

As you know, medical mistakes such as prescriptions being filled incorrectly, cost thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of lives yearly.

The article continues:

Government researchers estimate that health IT, like physician order-entry and standards-based electronic medical record systems, can help reduce tens of thousands of medical mistakes and billions of dollars in health-care costs annually in the U.S. There are already a handful of incentive programs underway by some private insurers, as well as a Medicare pilot program, that reward health-care providers who improve their quality-of-patient care using health IT.

Read more here