Privacy vs. Transparency: You’re in the Middle

Since 1996, HIPAA has required hospitals and other providers to strictly maintain the privacy and security of patient and clinical records.

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) required them to digitize those records for greater transparency.

Today, some 96% of hospitals and 78% of doctors’ offices use electronic health records.

As a result, patients can instantly access the notes from their doctor visits, review their prescriptions, see their lab results, and email questions to the doctor(s) they’ve been seeing. And doctors, whether primary care providers or specialists, can have a patient’s personal information and medical history right at their fingertips.

Unfortunately, so can others.

In 2018, a total of 18 million patient records were hacked and phished. In just the first half of 2019, almost twice as many – 32 million – were.

Clearly, there’s a tug of war between privacy and transparency, and hospitals are the rope.

In 2018, the last year for which complete figures are available, hospitals paid out an average of more than $2.5 million in settlements and civil monetary penalties. That year, the HHS Office of Civil Rights conducted a total of 25,520 complaint and compliance review investigations. And even if the vast majority don’t lead to cash penalties, even the mildest OCR action – resolution after intake and review – can still cost you staff hours and money.

That’s one reason it pays to keep on top of all the latest HIPAA and ePHI changes.

Another is on the horizon for this year. Throughout 2019, OCR has been considering HIPAA regulation changes, and at least some of those should become final this year. Some of those could include easing “aspects of HIPAA Rules that are proving unnecessarily burdensome for HIPAA covered entities and provide little benefit to patients and health plan members.”

Others involve making it easier for hospitals and doctors to coordinate, and requiring instead of just allowing hospitals to share ePHI data with other providers.

That’s why alerts to changes practically as they occur, determining how they apply to you, then implementing and documenting compliance with no wasted time or money makes for good self-defense.

In the battle between privacy and transparency, see how we can keep you out of the crossfire.

Is Your Budget Keeping Pace With Your Workload?

Every admission to a hospital triggers $1,200 in regulatory compliance costs, according to an American Hospital Association (AHA) report.

That’s because each hospital with post-acute care beds has to comply with 629 different federal regulations – plus any and all new ones that come along.

Best practices call for you to be constantly scanning the Federal Register and other sources, not just for new regulations but also for changes to old ones. To translate them from “Regulish” to English, so you can analyze what they mean. To decide which parts of which regulations apply to your hospital. To define and assign compliance tasks. And to update your IT, if needed, to monitor and document compliance.

That doesn’t come cheap.

An average 161-bed community hospital spends more than $7.5 million a year on federal compliance – $9 million if it has PAC beds. Plus an average of $411,000 on IT upgrades each year to monitor and document compliance.

While your compliance department is doing this, compliance departments at another 6,145 US hospitals are doing the exact same thing, the exact same way, running up the same kinds of costs.

No wonder American hospitals and health systems spend more than $38 billion a year duplicating each other’s compliance work.

But what if there were one online expert source that could cut out all that needless duplication? That could tell you what you need to know and let you manage your own hospital’s compliance progress in real time, 24/7/365, with just a few mouse clicks?

There is. And it can cut compliance costs through economies of scale, the way Henry Ford did for cars.

With more regulatory changes in the pipeline every year, you’re going to need more budget, more staff and more other resources. Odds are three-to-one you won’t get them. A 2018 study reported that fully 75% of compliance officers surveyed predicted that their budgets would either stay the same or get cut.

Want to beat those odds? Then you’ll want to learn more about a system that lets your compliance department accomplish more for much less.