Inpatient Facility Coding & Compliance Alert

Key: Make sure your business partners are on the up-and-up. How far does your facility go in policing your business partners' HIPAA information security practices? Check out this lesson from one Connecticut provider, and see if you need to take additional steps. The situation: VNA HealthCare in Hartford, Conn., and its parent Hartford Hospital, learned that a laptop was stolen from the home of a contractor's employee, according to a news statement from Hartford Hospital. The violation? The employee was working on hospital readmission data analysis. The laptop contained unencrypted data on more than 7,400 VNA patients and 2,000 hospital patients, they reveal.The data included patients' names, addresses, dates of birth, marital status, Social Security numbers, Medicaid and Medicare numbers, medical record numbers, and certain diagnosis and treatment information. Having such unencrypted data on the employee's laptop was a violation of the contractor's policy, the VNA and hospital note in [...]