Speaking

With the advent of electronic health records, medical data has become much more accessible to everyone, including criminals.

The Ponemon Institute’s National Study on Medical Identity Theft found “The number of data breaches among healthcare organizations is still growing – eroding patient privacy and contributing to medical identity theft”.

The Report also claims the average cost to resolve medical identity theft is a whopping $20,663 per victim.

All employers offering health insurance need to be mindful that they too can lose medical information even if they aren’t considered to be a medical provider. Health insurance policy numbers as well as any confidential data used to fill out a health insurance application is considered to be medical information.

Be sure you have adequate cyber insurance coverage and that your company is in compliance with the federal and state privacy & security/data breach laws.

Tweet This Post 

With the threat of being fired for a HIPAA violation constantly looming over the heads of medical provider employees, people are scared to talk about anything that happens at the hospital or office. Every employee tweet and Facebook posting is a potential lawsuit in the eyes of hospital legal departments.

Mercy Walworth Medical Center in Lake Geneva, WI fired two nurses who used their cell phones to take a picture of a patient’s X-ray and discussed it on their Facebook page.

A Twitter tweet by an administrative assistant at University Medical Center in Jackson, MS to Governor Haley Barbour suggesting he consider scheduling medical exams during normal business hours instead of when clinics are usually closed resulted in the employee being strongly encouraged to resign. When questioned about the incident, a hospital spokesperson said, “Disclosing a patient’s protected health information is a policy violation that we take very seriously. We will do whatever is necessary to protect the privacy of our patients. An investigation of this matter was pending and the employee resigned, so we consider it closed.”

Be sure your employees are trained on exactly what they can and cannot do with medical information. HIPAA requires it and so should you. It’ll help protect your employees and your business.

Tweet This Post 

If you are using Twitter, make sure you sign up to follow me.   You can do that by going to http://www.twitter.com/julieryanbiz

Most days, I post breaking news regarding business topics and identity theft issues to my Twitter account.

Tweet This Post 

Welcome to my blog.  I will use these pages to share business ideas, and stories about the people I meet, as well as breaking news in the field of business identity theft.   I welcome your comments.

Tweet This Post