Evil doers know that the best time to attack is during a crisis or a time of vulnerability. As the United States, and specifically, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) attempts to respond to and get ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., hackers, likely from a foreign enemy nation state, ramped
Health and Human Services
OCR Issues Five New HIPAA FAQs on Health Information Apps
By Conor Duffy on
Posted in HIPAA and Health Information
On April 18, 2019, the Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued five new FAQs addressing the applicability of HIPAA to the use of software applications (apps) by individuals to receive health information from their providers.
The new FAQs are available here under the Header “Access Right, Apps and APIs.”…
Anthem Settles with OCR for $16M for 2015 Data Breach
By Linn Foster Freedman on
The Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced this week that it has settled the largest health care data breach for the largest enforcement fine in history. OCR settled the massive data breach Anthem suffered in 2015 for $16 million—a substantially larger fine than any others assessed by OCR for…
HHS/OCR releases guidance for mobile apps and health information exchange and “fact sheets”
By Linn Foster Freedman on
Posted in HIPAA and Health Information
The Office for Civil Rights has provided additional educational materials for app developers through the app developers portal that it developed last fall.
The new material is intended to assist healthcare entities and software developers to learn from different scenarios that explain when HIPAA applies to mobile health apps and when it doesn’t. In particular,…