Question

Perform research for current HIPAA Breaches and Violations. Analyze the real world case and discuss case for your discussion post. Research the HIPAA Ruling and quote the specific violation and discuss what the covered entity should have done to avoid the violation or breach. Your posting must be thorough and detailed. You can use resources such as the OCR for cases and HealthIT.gov for the HIPAA ruling.

Answer 1

Here are some of the recent HIPAA breaches and violation happened:

1. Cottage Health- exposure of the ePHI over the internet: OCR has come to an agreement for settle the cottage health with $300000. Due to some technical faults, security on the servers were accidentally got removed and the ePHI data can be accessed over the internet.
2. Pagosa spring medical centre: OCR fined this meducal centre with $111400 as they failed to remove the access of an formal employee over the web based scheduling calendar and thus lead to loss of patients medical records were at stake.
3. Advanced care hospitalist: when OCR investigated, they found there are nearly 9000 patients' data were disclosed. Failures of the HIPAA compliances including poor security to protect the patient data.

Here are few ways that the medical company should follow to avoid severe HIPAA violations:

• Implementation of encryption and firewalls: This is the most important security that should be implemented in order to avoid hipaa violations. Encryption of data will keep the data more secured and enabling firewalls will block unwanted and untrusted traffic to enter the network.
• Proper education and information: this is another way to avoid hipaa violation, where proper training regarding security should be properly given to the employees of the medical centre.
• By not disclosing patients information: the medical centre needs to be more sensible while dealing with the patient data. And also not revealing patients information anywhere. This way they can avoid hipaa violation.