Dear RIS Insider,
April showers may bring May flowers, but the forecast for April 2005 may be even gloomier for U.S. healthcare IT personnel. The deadline for compliance with the security provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a scant 13 months away.
Some IT personnel may already have all the security standards in place, while others are just starting to work through an implementation checklist. For most facilities, compliance is probably somewhere in between implementation and completion.
At the 2004 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, only a handful of IT directors admitted to having implemented electronic protected healthcare information access auditing, a required standard.
The security standards are fairly straightforward, and compliance can be simple, according to an electronic poster presentation at the HIMSS show by Kristen Sostrom and Jeff Collmann, Ph.D. The duo presented a clear-cut look at the standards and implementation specifications that all U.S. health plans, healthcare clearinghouses, and providers must comply with by next year.
As a RIS Radiology Insider subscriber, you have access to this story before the rest of our AuntMinnie readers. Just click here to read more about Sostrom and Collmann’s tips on keeping security simple.
If you have a comment or story to share about radiology informatics, please get in touch with me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.
