Businesses and Organizations in the U.S. Healthcare Industry are arguably subject to the most stringent data privacy and security laws on the planet. If you’re a Healthcare IT leader involved in compliance efforts – we certainly sympathize with you. Recently, Aaron McIntosh and I held a webinar on HIPAA Compliance for 2017 and Beyond in partnership with HiMSS – a 60,000+ member not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving healthcare through the best use of IT1. Our aim was to improve Healthcare IT leaders’ understanding of HIPAA in the context of the trends, breaches and common compliance issues we’re seeing across the industry so far in 2017. But it turns out that we gained far more insight than we shared with our audience of more than 140+ IT and Compliance leaders.
HIPAA in 2017: failing to plan equals planning to fail
Another day, another breach. In a relatively unsurprising start to 2017, healthcare breaches are on track to reach new heights (or is it depths?). In what has become a somewhat satirical annual tradition, analysts forecast upcoming breach trends for the notoriously hard hit healthcare industry, and title each year with a fitting name. In 2015, it kicked off with the Year of the Healthcare Breach. In 2016, it was the Rise of Ransomware. So as I was reading about yet another breach in April, a question came to mind, what will “Year of the” be for 2017?