UPDATE: 2/10/2014. On Friday 2/7/2014, CMS announced an extension until March 31, 2014 for Eligible Professionals to submit their 2013 EHR Meaningful Use (MU) attestation. In addition, Eligible Hospitals that had trouble submitting their 2013 MU attestation may be able to retroactively submit their MU attestation to avoid the 2015 ...
On December 10, 2013, the Office of Inspector General for the United States Department of Health & Human Services (OIG) issued a report finding that hospital implementation of fraud safeguards in electronic health records (EHRs) falls short of the recommended standards. The report carries out one of the OIG's 2013 Work Plan objectives ...
On Friday, November 6, 2013, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) announced its proposal to extend the timeline by which eligible healthcare providers must demonstrate a "meaningful use" (MU) of a certified electronic health record (EHR) in ...
By Margaret Levi and Kathie McDonald-McClure
As we previously reported in a blog post on September 24, 2013, an eligible professional, eligible hospital, or critical access hospital receiving an incentive payment for the meaningful use (MU) of electronic health records (EHRs) will likely be subject to a stringent audit from either Medicare ...
Even as health care providers have moved to convert from paper to electronic health records, it remains just as important to continue to protect paper health information records. While the majority of data breaches involve mobile devices such as laptops and flash drives, a significant number of large data breaches (those affecting 500 or ...
by Margaret Young Levi and Kathie McDonald-McClure
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) has a new acronym, “LoProCo,” relating to assessing data breaches under HIPAA, as amended by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the HIPAA Omnibus ...