New RADAR tool for HITECH data breach risk assessments
Posted on July 20th, 2010
ID Experts today announced RADAR (HITECH Risk Assessment, Documentation and Reporting), the industry’s first expert software tool to measure a data breach incident’s risk index (IRI) by combining the severity of the episode and the sensitivity of the exposed data to quantify the incident’s overall harm threshold. Designed for healthcare providers, HIPAA covered entities, and their business associates, RADAR was developed to efficiently and consistently meet all of the requirements for complying with the HITECH Act data breach notification provisions for security and privacy breach incident harm threshold assessment, documentation and reporting.
Security breaches are now remarkably commonplace in healthcare; more than 55 were reported to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the first six months of 2010. In fact, healthcare is the second most breached industry, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. And security breaches, whether digital- or paper-based, can happen at any given moment—physical theft of a laptop from an employee’s car, deliberate abuse of system access, misdirected faxes and emails, malware attacks, unintentional human error, unauthorized access, a lost backup drive. Additionally, the future of healthcare dictates the use of electronic medical records, raising fresh concerns of protecting patient privacy, PHI threats and medical identity theft.
Dr. Larry Ponemon
Tags: Data Breach, Risk
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Are You Ready for a Healthcare Data Breach?
Posted on July 10th, 2010
This article is reprinted from Healthcare IT News with the author’s permission.
The handling of data breach incidents has become a way of life for healthcare providers and with other HIPAA covered entities. With the passage of the HITECH Act last year, there are now substantial penalties that can be levied, up to $1.5 million. This fact, combined with a requirement to notify the Department of Health and Human Services as well as the media for data breach incidents that affect over 500 individuals has, for the first time, resulted in public records being kept for such incidents.
If you oversee privacy, compliance, or IT for a hospital system, a group practice, a health insurance company, other covered entities, or even one of their business associates, the HITECH Act and its privacy and data breach provisions require your close attention. W
Tags: Breach, Data Breach
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