HIPAA Breach Evaluation and Reporting - What Qualifies as a Reportable Breach and how to Report It Recorded Webinar | Jim Sheldon Dean | From: Nov 18, 2021 - To: Dec 31, 2021 |
There are several steps that must be taken to determine if an incident is a breach, and whether or not that breach is reportable. Determining whether to report or not is necessarily straightforward, but there are guidelines to follow to help at every step of the way. If the evaluation of necessity to report is not done correctly, you may not make the right decisions about reporting and be subject to penalties for non-compliance upon an investigation of a breach by HHS. Penalties for non-compliance can up to millions of dollars in cases of willful negligence, so it is essential to evaluate incidents to see if they are reportable breaches and act properly on the evaluation.
Areas Covered in the Webinar:-
Why Should You Attend:-
The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule has been in effect since 2010 and was significantly modified in 2013. We will discuss the origins of the rule and how it works, including interactions with other HIPAA rules and penalties for violations.
Whenever there may be a privacy issue involving Protected Health Information, there may be a reportable breach under the HIPAA regulations. Not all privacy violations are reportable breaches, though, so it is essential to have a good process for evaluating incidents to see if they have resulted in a reportable breach.
Any privacy rule violation that results in an acquisition, access, use, or disclosure of PHI in violation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule may be a breach unless the incident is one of the defined exceptions from the definition. A breach is reportable unless the information was secured or destroyed in the incident, or unless a risk analysis shows that there is a low probability of compromise of the information, based on at least four factors defined in the rules.
We will examine how to determine if a privacy violation is potentially a breach according to the definition, and then describe the subsequent steps in the evaluation, if it is determined that the definition has been met. We will discuss the exceptions to the breach definition for inadvertent internal uses, or when it can be determined that the information could not be retained in any way by the receiving party.
Entities can avoid notification if the information has been encrypted according to Federal standards. We will cover the guidance from the US Department of Health and Human Services that shows how to encrypt to prevent the need for notification in the event of lost data. Failing that, a risk analysis can be conducted to determine the probability of compromise of the information, considering four factors: what the data is and how well-identified it is, to whom was it released and do they have obligations to protect the information, whether or not the information exposed, and whether or not the incident has been mitigated properly. However, it must be noted that any compromise of the information by Ransomware that denies access or control of your information should be treated as a reportable breach.
In addition, any reporting must be made within the required time frames, or penalties can result, as shown in recent enforcement actions by HHS for late reporting of breaches.
We will help you understand what isn’t a breach and under what circumstances you don’t have to consider breach notification. You’ll find out how to report the smaller breaches (less than 500 individuals), and you’ll know why you want to avoid a breach involving more than 500 individuals – media notices, Web site notices, and immediate notification of HHS, including posting on the HHS breach notification “wall of shame” on the Web.
We will explain, based on historical analysis of reported breaches, what measures must be taken today to protect information from the most common threats, as well as discuss information security trends and explain what kinds of efforts will need to be undertaken in the future to protect the security of PHI.
Who Will Benefit:-
This webinar will provide valuable assistance to all personnel in medical offices, practice groups, hospitals, academic medical centers, insurers, business associates (shredding, data storage, systems vendors, billing services, etc). Employees who will benefit include:
Jim Sheldon-Dean is the founder and director of compliance services at Lewis Creek Systems, LLC, a Vermont-based consulting firm founded in 1982, providing information privacy and security regulatory compliance services to a wide variety of healthcare entities. He is a frequent speaker regarding HIPAA, including speaking engagements at numerous regional and national healthcare association conferences and conventions and the annual NIST/OCR HIPAA Security Conference. Sheldon-Dean has more than 18 years of experience specializing in HIPAA compliance, more than 36 years of experience in policy analysis and implementation, business process analysis, information systems and software development, and eight years of experience doing hands-on medical work as a Vermont certified volunteer emergency medical technician. Sheldon-Dean received his B.S. degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Vermont and his master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
