HIPAA Enforcement Update: Areas of Focus - HealthcareInfoSecurity

The Department of Health and Human Services is paying particular attention to complaints involving patients’ access to their health information; it’s also focusing on investigations of organizations with patterns of HIPAA noncompliance, says Nick Heesters of the HHS Office for Civil Rights.

Details about how OCR plans to ramp up enforcement of patients’ record access rights are still being worked out, he says in an interview with Information Security Media Group at the HIMSS19 conference in Orlando, Florida.

Regarding how OCR will identify patient access cases to investigate, Heesters says: “Certainly, patient complaints is a main method by which OCR receives issues for potential investigations.”