Help Me With HIPAA

Here we go for another year! It is amazing that this is the third new year we have covered on HMWH. There are so many things that have happened over that time and as we head into 2018, so many things to look into our crystal ball and make 7 educated guesses about 2018. We may not be predicting the future but we both have some opinions about what we see happening out there in the world of HIPAA, privacy, and cybersecurity in the coming months.

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Is HIPAA compliance expensive? Or, is it short-sighted to only worry about what HIPAA compliance costs? A new report from Ponemon Institute, The True Cost of Compliance with Data Protection Regulations, looks at compliance costs across several industries and multinational organizations. The study has a lot of details as we always expect from Ponemon Institute.

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Each year Bojan Sabioncello, our audio engineer in Split, Croatia, puts together his blooper roll to mock us. Granted, he spends the whole year having to listen to us without a chance to respond until now. This his only chance to respond to a year's worth of our comments and screw-ups.

We will be back next week with a new episode. Happy Holidays from the whole Help Me With HIPAA team!

As 2017 comes to a close, we are making our lists and checking them twice. Time to find out who we thought was more naughty than nice this year. The Naughty List 2017 discussion includes everything from big news data breaches such as Equifax and Uber down to stolen hard drives and password issues. Feel free to add your naughty list nominations in the comments.

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A new report on phishing was recently released titled: Data Breaches, Phishing, or Malware? Understanding the Risks of Stolen Credentials. The report of findings from a study that was done by Google, University of California, Berkeley, and the International Computer Science Institute. It was a year-long study of account hijacking, stolen credentials, phishing and malware attacks. The findings are clear that phishing is a problem in ways we may not have thought before now. In the study, the researchers followed other hacker methods used against email addresses they found on the darknet sites for sale. The search netted 12.4 million addresses that were determined to be potential victims of phishing kits out of the total 1.9 billion usernames and passwords exposed by data breaches. So, it is obvious that this isn't a tiny study over a short amount of time.

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Recently, we have dealt with our clients struggling with vendors in the vetting process. Particularly, tech vendors of any sort. Many vendors have written off the HIPAA compliance requirements by simply saying "We are SOC2 compliant so you don't have to worry about anything". Often that is said by sales and management folks with a great deal of confidence. After spending some time at a recent HITRUST meeting I heard just how many people shouldn't be so confident when making that statement. As with anything else the devil is in the details. What does SOC2 mean and how can you tell if that really means anything to you? Trust but verify is the key to answering that question for yourself.

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We are enjoying the holiday with our families. But, we didn't want to miss a chance to share time with our listeners. Today we are replaying one of our favorite episodes 8 Common HIPAA Myths.

Hard to believe another year is coming to an end. It is time to review 2017 and plan for 2018. That means it is time to make your list of 5 Things To Do Before Year's End. Just in case you need some help with that list, we made one for you!

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Text messaging is often the preferred method of communication for many people today. It does have great advantages with its simplicity, instant delivery, and convenience. However, I did not mention security on that list. Text messaging is not secure by default. Yes, you can secure it but that requires apps, platforms, and planning. The bottom line is the communication method most people call text messaging is not secured enough to send and receive PHI without patient authorization to use it.

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Lately, there have been a lot of articles in the "nerd news" services about various problems and vulnerabilities looming on the horizon or happening right now. Usually, there are one or two in a normal week or so that really get our attention. The last few weeks though it seems a bit different. Maybe it is just noise or paranoia created to drive traffic to sites. But, sometimes it becomes overwhelming enough to take time to step back and look at the details as a whole and determine what you really are seeing here. So, today we discuss: is there a cyber storm brewing on the horizon?

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