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Health Care Providers to Self-Police Themselves on Privacy Harm
In an article that hit the web this week, a new DHHS rule is purported to allow health care providers to determine if their privacy breaches have caused any harm. While I understand the nature of assigning the reporting burden to healthcare companies, I don’t think this new rule is in the public’s (or patient’s) best interest. We already know that most complaints related to HIPAA are not investigated. This new provision all but ensures that most breaches will not even be reported.
Let’s not kid ourselves…although we’d all like to think that our health care organizations are worthy of our trust and good faith (and many are), when all is said and done, they are businesses and they need to keep the bottom line in mind at all times. These new “self-service” breach notification rules could put some of us on the unpleasant receiving end of what happens when the fox holds sentry over the chicken coop.
With that said, it’s worth pointing out that in a recent independent survey of several hundred IT practitioners in the healthcare industry, a whopping 80 percent of the respondents reported that their organization had experienced one or more data breaches involving the loss or theft of electronic health information in the past year!
The real solution is stringent monitoring, along with input from an external party, like a privacy ombudsman. This is a model followed today by many press organizations, as well as police departments with regard to misconduct complaints.
Read the full article here: http://bit.ly/4CaTPG
Posted November 19, 2009 in Healthcare | Permalink | Comments (0)
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