Federal officials are weighing a rewrite of regulations designed to ensure that people with disabilities do not face discrimination from medical providers amid concerns about unequal access.
GovInfoSecurity
HealthInfoSec) • January 18, 2021 18 Minutes Twitter
Privacy attorney Kirk Nahra of the law firm WilmerHale
The prospects for passing a U.S. privacy law will improve under the Biden administration, predicts attorney Kirk Nahra, who monitors regulations. The fact that we have both a Biden administration and Democratic control of both houses of Congress makes it somewhat more likely there s a national privacy law sooner rather than later, he says in an interview with Information Security Media Group. But soon isn t tomorrow. It s not that the first priority of the new administration and new Congress, he notes. My prediction is that there is a reasonable likelihood of a national privacy law during the first term of the Biden administration, but that s four years long.
Jan 15, 2021 - 03:13 PM
The Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights yesterday announced collaborative efforts with the state of North Carolina, the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guidelines Task Force, the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, and the Indian Health Service in updating each entity’s crisis standards of care to provide equitable health care to individuals with disabilities and the elderly.
Building on its prior work to address discrimination concerns during COVID-19, OCR provided technical assistance to each entity on CSC provisions that incorporate protections, prohibitions and language updates to ensure older persons and persons with disabilities are not excluded from health care. For more details on the OCR announcement, click here.
Saturday, January 16, 2021
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently vacated a $4.3 million civil monetary penalty imposed by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) in 2017 against the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (“MD Anderson”). The Court held that OCR’s civil monetary penalty for alleged violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) Privacy Rule and HIPAA Security Rule was “arbitrary, capricious, and otherwise unlawful.”
The MD Anderson case stemmed from three breaches suffered by MD Anderson in 2012 and 2013 that resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of the protected health information (“PHI”) of approximately 35,000 patients. OCR investigated and imposed the $4.3 million civil monetary penalty, finding that MD Anderson had allegedly, during the calendar years 2011-2013, (1) failed to implement a mechanism to encrypt el
January 15, 2021 6:09 AM By Brandon Lee
President-elect Joe Biden outlined plans for a $20 billion national vaccination program to speed up the pace of Covid-19 immunizations, calling the effort so far âa dismal failureâ in an address last night.
âWeâll have to move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated, to create more places for them to get vaccinated, to mobilize more medical teams to get shots in peopleâs arms, to increase vaccine supply, and to get it out the door as fast as possible,â Biden said.
Biden said he would lay out plans today to âcorrect courseâ and meet the goal for distributing 100 million shots in his administrationâs first 100 days.