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Rise of the Little Guys | How Small Vendors Carry Most of Your Risk

Did you know that over 86% of vendors servicing healthcare providers in 2020 are either in the Very Small (between 1-50 employees) or Small (between 51-500 employees) categories? That figure derives from analysis that was conducted in February 2020 of security assessments conducted on CORL’s database of over 50,000 healthcare vendors. This latest analysis highlights a growing trend of smaller vendors dominating the healthcare vendor landscape and changing the way in which healthcare vendor risk managers need to think about third-party risk mitigation approaches. Read More

Confronting Digital Health Privacy Risks via the New NIST Framework

The move to digital healthcare is advancing innovative uses for health information that also introduce unforeseen risks to patient privacy. Federal and state regulations and standards bodies are playing catchup to stem the tide of privacy breaches and harm to patients as information disseminates across disparate healthcare systems and platforms. This blog post provides an overview and Meditology’s recommendations for implementation of the NIST Privacy Framework: A Tool for Improving Privacy Through Enterprise Risk Management. Read More

Got Certs? The Pros and Cons of Enterprise Security Certifications

Healthcare has become a prime target for malicious actors bent on profiting from the resale and reuse of patient information. Healthcare entities are scrambling to sure up security controls for their own organizations and third-party business partners as the sprawl of patient information continues to drive widespread data breach events. Many healthcare Covered Entities and Business Associates servicing the industry are pursuing or evaluating enterprise security certifications to provide assurance of their security program and control effectiveness to the market. Read More

A Vision for 2020: Top 10 Healthcare Security Trends for the New Year

The vision for 2020 healthcare security and privacy is clouded with emerging security threats, compliance and enforcement activity, and rapidly evolving business models and regulatory landscapes. However, we can also see many opportunities on the horizon this year and beyond to improve the industry’s privacy and security protections of healthcare organizations and patient information. Read More

The Impact of OCR’s New HIPAA Penalty Limits

A new structure for HIPAA violation Civil Monetary Penalties (CMP) was announced by the OCR on April 26, 2019. This change greatly reduces the financial risk of HIPAA breach violations for covered entities that can demonstrate updated security risk management plans, policies and procedures for sensitive patient data. Read More

Bursting at the Seams: Security Audit Response Overload

Every pipeline has a capacity limit. Problems begin when the flow is clogged or overwhelmed. First as a small leak, then a rupture occurs where the whole pipeline is in jeopardy. Only we are not talking about fluids drowning us, it is the increasing volume of Healthcare Security Audits. How can businesses meet the security demands of healthcare clients and provide meaningful and timely responses to their security audit questionnaires? Read More

Privacy Data Breaches | The Importance of Assessing Business Associate Privacy Controls

It’s a typical Monday. An inbox full of emails, a calendar full of appointments and a fresh cup of coffee nearby. The phone rings and it’s a patient calling to a report a possible inappropriate disclosure of their information. The patient’s mother is irate that a sensitive diagnosis was revealed in child support discussions. She is certain that the information came from your hospital. After calming the caller, you start your investigation and quickly find out that the breach was likely caused by an employee of your population health vendor. Read More

AMCA Breach Highlights Vulnerability of Debt Collection Sector

How wide of a net must we cast for vendor security assessments? This question is made more important by the recent American Medical Collections Agency (AMCA) breaches affecting patients served by clinical lab testing providers LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics and BioReference Laboratories. AMCA was one of the largest Debt Collection companies in the U.S. and, in the course of the past year, has reported 25 million breached patient records by a hacker accessing their databases. Read More