Resource Library

A data breach doesn’t need to be criminal or intentional to be reportable. When a storage device is small, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the device was lost, misplaced or stolen. However, even if a flash drive is presumably lost, a breach analysis must still be conducted and potentially affected patients must be notified if there is a probability of data compromise.

A review of the data on the OCR Breach Portal indicates that only about 20 percent of healthcare data breaches through 2017 are the result of hacking, but they involve large numbers of records.¹ Unfortunately, the healthcare industry also has more data breaches than any other industry.² There are various reasons for this. We describe some of those here and offer recommendations for preventing HIPAA data breaches caused by criminal hackers.

Your patients are online, and they’re searching for information about their symptoms. Maintaining a medical blog for your practice is an effective way to take advantage of this changing landscape of online medical knowledge and virtual physician-patient relationships.

NORCAL’s risk management specialists were asked to provide EHR liability risk issues they were seeing in the field. In addition to the issues covered in the EHR case studies presented in the March 2014 issue of Claims Rx, their list included:

Clinicians and staff will find ways to work around aspects of an EHR system that are frustrating, time-consuming or inflexible. As the following case indicates, workarounds can generate errors, undermine patient safety and result in lawsuits.