Home / risk assessment

Archives

Category Archive for: "risk assessment"

HIPAA Risk Assessment: Lessons from General Motors

For healthcare providers who’ve been putting off doing a risk assessment and developing a mitigation plan, Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, could make a compelling case against that kind of procrastination. If ten years earlier GM had identified the ignition switch in last year’s headlines as a potentially deadly defect and taken steps then to fix it, it could have saved at least 13 lives, prevented the company from having to pay $35 million in government fines and untold millions more from civil lawsuits, made the recall of 2.6 million vehicles unnecessary, and spared the CEO from having […]

Urban Legends & the HIPAA Risk Analysis

Strange as it might seem, HIPAA compliance and the New York City sewer system share a connection. Both have given rise to “stories with little or no supporting evidence that spread spontaneously in varying forms and often have elements of humor, moralizing, or horror” — in other words, both contain the stuff of “urban legends.” In the case of New York City, urban legend says that large alligators prowl its sewer system, flushed there by New Yorkers returning from Florida vacations with live, little “lizards,” souvenirs they soon tired of. In the case of HIPAA, legend has it that the […]

How to Prepare for the Risk Assessment HIPAA Requires

My brother-in-law retired a few years ago after more than three decades in private practice. He ran his busy office the old fashioned way — without computers. His patients’ records were kept in manila folders filed in a wall of shelves. In longhand, his office manager recorded appointments in a big black book and kept track of accounts in a ledger tucked into a backroom drawer. Today when I sat down to blog here about how to prepare for a risk analysis/risk assessment (the terms are interchangeable), I couldn’t help but think about my brother-in-law’s healthcare office and how […]