Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Health technology that keeps our nation fit and able abounds and impacts lives everywhere. We not only access and maintain our health by the minute, checking out our own personal stats, we also utilize ranking systems to compare our health with others on our phones, on our tablets, and even on our bodies with innovative wearable gadgets.

“These fitness trackers, their related social media sites where individuals share health information, and other technologies are changing the way we interact and control our own health,” says Karen B. DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc., national coordinator for health information technology and assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Human & Health Services (HHS), and Jocelyn Samuels JD, director of the Office of Civil Rights at the HHS in a July 19 ONC press release. “However, they did not exist when Congress originally enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996.”

The gravity and amount of health information passed around the digital world is such as much of it is not covered by HIPAA, which “applies only to organizations known as ‘covered entities’ — health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers conducting certain electronic transactions — and their business associates.” Three government agencies have combined to compile a report to encourage further review and study on the issue in order to tighten up the safety net, protecting both patients and providers.

The HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) worked together on the report titled, Examining Oversight of the Privacy & Security of Health Data Collected by Entities Not Regulated by HIPAA, and presented to Congress on July 19. The outline report focuses on concerns about the how and where of shared health information covered and not covered by HIPAA.

DeSalvo and Samuels hope that the report is just the first step in reevaluating and improving health care information safety and security.

Resources: To read the ONC article, visit https://www.healthit.gov/buzz-blog/privacy-and-security-of-ehrs/examining-oversight-privacy-security-health-data-collected-entities-not-regulated-hipaa/.

To read the Examining Oversight of the Privacy & Security of Health Data Collected by Entities Not Regulated by HIPAA, visit https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/non-covered_entities_report_june_17_2016.pdf.