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.

Physicians and hospitals are beginning to build more infrastructures focused on community health. As health care continues to adapt to an aging population and a consequential epidemiologic transition from acute illness to chronic disease, physician leadership in community health becomes an increasingly important factor in providing medical care.

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.

According to the defense expert in the following case, patients who can’t or won’t engage in alternative treatments for their pain should not be prescribed pain medications as a matter of course. Consider how the overdose in the following case could have been prevented if the internist had followed the CDC opioid prescribing guidelines.