HHS' Office of Civil Rights, which oversees the administration of HIPAA, will begin working closely with mobile health companies to make sure HIPAA rules are clear and unambiguous, according to a letter HHS sent to Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Tom Marino (R-PA) in November.
The letter, signed by HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, was sent in response to a request Marino and DeFazio sent in...
In developing policies for managing data handled by and stored on mobile devices, healthcare organizations should look beyond privacy and security and consider the legal ramifications of mobile health information, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) says.
"While much has been written stressing how extremely important security and privacy issues are in the use of mobile...
There's a lot of talk out there about text messaging not being appropriate for many healthcare uses. The usual excuses are that SMS is not secure to healthcare standards, that you can't really prioritize delivery of text messages and that there is no way to "escalate" texts if earlier messages aren't acted upon.
Those are all valid points. In particular, anything involving personally identifiable...
Last week Dr. Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, kicked off a half-day HHS event focused on privacy and security issues surrounding the use of mobile devices in healthcare. Mostashari's comments summed up the mobile health opportunity for providers while pointing out the potential problems, too.
Mostashari described mobile phones as ubiquitous,...
MobileStorm has launched a new version of its messaging platform called mobileStorm for Healthcare, which is a secure mobile messaging platform that allows HIPAA-compliant transmission of PHI (protected health information), according to the company. This week at the Wireless Life-Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit in San Diego, California the company announced the platform, which it says can "...
