Meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) has been an important topic in the healthcare world since the federal government introduced the Meaningful Use (MU) Program to encourage healthcare organizations to adopt EHRs. Organizations have had to ensure that they are using certified EHR technology and that they are meeting all the security requirements outlined by the MU guidelines. Let us take a look at the top 5 things you should know about security, privacy, and the MU Program.

Each month in 2016 has seen substantial PHI breaches, causing an influx of records for sale on the dark web, which is now causing a sudden price collapse. Hacking and ransomware continue to loom large with several instances of patient data irretrievably lost.

Over the past few weeks, we focused our “Patients at Risk” series on the various threats that hospital insiders present to patient data. Now, we are shifting our attention to ones stemming from external parties.

In our last “Patients at Risk" post, we discussed how insiders can pose a threat to electronic protected health information (ePHI) through health data breaches and explored why hospital leaders identify this group as the top threat to patient privacy. Within this category of insider threats, motivations for snooping can be divided into two main categories: malicious motivation involving criminal activity and innocent motivation involving curious employees with insufficient training on what inappropriate access to the EHR is.  

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule, went into effect on February 20, 2003. The Rule, as we all know, is about protecting patient privacy and preventing medical data breaches. It lays out the minimum standards a healthcare organization must meet in order to guard the electronic protected health information (ePHI) of their patients.