Concierge Medicine: The Return of the House Call
Many physicians, frustrated by the bureaucracy of modern medical practice, the financial pressure to shorten appointments and limit face time with patients, and the delays and hassle of dealing with health insurers for reimbursement, are increasingly turning to concierge medical practices as an alternative. Under this business model, patients pay…
PCI DSS Compliance: The Other Privacy Rules
In previous posts, we covered the ins and outs of HIPAA and its four general rules: Privacy, Security, Breach Notification and Enforcement. In this post, we discuss the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”), an often overlooked privacy standard that, while overlapping somewhat with HIPAA, is a completely…
Protecting Your Reputation Online
Every doctor has to deal with unhappy patients from time to time. The proliferation of social media websites such as Facebook, Yelp and Twitter, as well as doctor-specific rating sites like Healthgrades.com, Vitals.com and RateMDs.com have allowed unhappy patients the means to seriously damage your on-line reputation, regardless of the…
Navigating the Regulatory Environment for Doctors Part 6 – HIPAA Enforcement
In our last two posts we’ve evaluated HIPAA’s Privacy Rule and the Security Rule/Breach Notification Rule, which outline your duties under HIPAA. In our final post in this series, we’re going to take a close look at what happens if you violate, those rules, whether intentionally or inadvertently.
Navigating the Regulatory Environment for Doctors Part 5 – HIPAA Security and Breach Notification
In our last post we started our discussion of HIPAA, the federal law governing patient privacy, with a look at HIPAA’s Privacy Rule. HIPAA is intended to impose nationwide standards on doctors in protecting patient privacy and pre-empts, or supersedes, any conflicting state laws. Therefore, Arizona’s patient privacy laws largely…