Another Smear added to the hall of shame
Every now and then medical negligence and non-compliance reports rears its ugly face causing traumatic repercussions that shakes the basic foundations of any establishment. This time it has resurfaced again. The victim is Health Net, a health insurance company that has been penalized with a massive amount of $250,000 for compromising with patients’ personal health information due to a missing drive.
This incident adds to the rising number of breaches and totals to 256 incidents affecting 10.2 million patients. It is also the first one to be marked in history as a HIPAA civil lawsuit filed by a state attorney general enabled by the HITECH Act. This is the second time that Health Net has been charged with breach of personal health information.
It is a bewildering to note that the institutions associated with the medical profession, fail to understand the emphasis on enforcements to control the physical security parameters, the existing policies and their business associates despite clear instructions from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
It can be considered a willing negligence on the company’s part to rely on flimsy third party policy structures for safeguarding patients’ confidential information, especially with this being the second incidence of negligence. As the HIPAA HITECH laws are become more exacting there seems to be barely any improvements.
There is still hope for healthcare organizations to recover their practices from further deterioration by implementing the cloud based compliance management software solutions. This compliance system traces all malignant attacks meant to paralyze the normal functions of the business. It provides the most recent information with real-time updates. Its unique feature is its intense visibility into the status of the compliance processes.
The processes are automated and follow a streamlined path without deviating from its course. There is a lot of integration and coordination involved which makes it easy to secure the security loopholes and construct a resilient defensive mechanism. It becomes easy to track and monitor the activities of the business associates to ensure that they are in adherence with the metrics. Due to automatic updating procedures the existing policies are continually amended and kept in sync with the latest policies and procedures.
Organizations have also attributed their weak security to incompatible infrastructure. With the cloud based healthcare compliance system there is no need for any investments in new infrastructure and therefore deals with the age-old grouse of incompatible infrastructure in the healthcare organizations.
Organizations can put an end to their distress by employing the cost-saving and amiable cloud-based HITECH compliance management solution and grab the attention of the HHS and OCR in a positive light.
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