Health industry group releases draft of security standards

Anne Zieger — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:29:58 -0500

We've been telling you about the new requirements for information security for all healthcare providers--that since healthcare providers are creditors, they need to have identity theft policies in place by next year. Now a group of large healthcare companies is attempting to create a set of security practices that can be standardized. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

For the big healthcare companies, not having to vet every member's security policies would result in a huge savings (though for the members, it could end up being a lot more security than they feel they really need).

The standards, which were just released in draft form from the non-profit Health Information Trust Alliance LLC (HITRUST), are a collaboration from the nine large healthcare organizations that created HITRUST. They hope that the standards will be widely embraced, but only time will tell if smaller organizations will get on the bandwagon.

To learn more about the new draft standards:
- read this Wall Street Journal piece (reg. req.)

Dental HMO leaks personal information to website

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:59:55 -0400

Here we go again! As reported by the Baltimore Sun, a CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield dental HMO accidentally leaked personal information--including Social Security numbers--of around 75,000 patients on a public website in February, failing to inform them of the gaffe for three weeks. While the company claims none of the information has been misused, it also has offered members 12 months of free credit monitoring, and information to contact credit bureaus for fraud alert purposes. Still, this is the second time in two months that this sort of thing has happened. What has to happen for these sorts of mistakes to cease?

For more information:
- read the Baltimore Sun's article

Information Security

Health industry group releases draft of security standards

Dental HMO leaks personal information to website