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Premera Blue Cross says 11 million records breached

Boston-based health insurer Premera Blue Cross announced recently that a cyberattack might have exposed medical data and financial information of 11 million customers.

No date yet for OCR’s HIPAA audits

The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) still has not set a date for when the next round of HIPAA audits, originally planned for fall 2014, will take place.

Anthem refuses audit by Office of Inspector General before and after massive HIPAA breach

After all the negative press that Anthem suffered when reporting a HIPAA breach that affected 80 million customers, one might think they would avoid more bad publicity. But the health insurer is under fire for refusing to let the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency overseeing the federal employee health benefits program, audit its IT security.

Good computer logs critical to detecting breach

A detailed record of who accessed data, when, and how often might be the only way an organization can trace the source of a HIPAA breach.

Blue Cross Blue Shield employees charged with taking and sharing data screen shots

Eleven people have been charged after a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) employee allegedly printed and shared screen shots of more than 5,000 subscriber profiles. The 11 people are charged with identity theft and credit card fraud, in what some observers are calling an example of how criminals can get past even the best HIPAA security measures.

Statins After an MI: Does it Happen?

Following a hospitalization for coronary heart disease (CHD) or acute coronary syndrome (ACS), randomized trials demonstrate that high-intensity atorvastatin is more effective than either placebo or low- to moderate-intensity therapy with either pravastatin or atorvastatin.^1-3 Based on this evidence, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association guidelines recommend high-intensity therapy in cases of an acute cardiac event, and recommend therapy be initiated before discharge.

A Guide to When and How to Stop CPR

Although health care providers undergo hours of training and re-certification to provide resuscitative efforts for patients in cardiopulmonary arrest, few are given guidance in terms of when and how to stop it.

Post-ICU Stress Symptoms Associated with Increased Acute Care Service Utilization

Over the past two decades, advances in critical care have resulted in more patients surviving to hospital discharge, but these successes are attenuated by several sequelae of critical illness, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).¹ Risk factors for and the health care ramifications of these disorders are poorly understood. Given this, Davydow and colleagues aimed to investigate whether PTSD symptoms in the acute (< 1 month) ICU hospitalization period and PTSD and depressive symptoms at 3 months post-ICU were risk factors for future hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits.

Nasal Screening for MRSA: The New Basis for De-escalation of Empiric Antibiotics?

Although nasal screening for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a widely accepted method for infection control, the relationship between nasal carriage and development of MRSA lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) is not well studied. Tilahun and colleagues sought to determine the association between MRSA nasal swab results and MRSA LRTI in a medical ICU. In this single-site, retrospective cohort study, 165 patients were diagnosed with pneumonia and had both nasal swabbing and culturing of respiratory specimens within 24 hours of admission.

Inpatient and Outpatient Care Providers: Why Can’t We Just Work Together?

Many problems occur after a patient is discharged that are a direct result of poor coordination of care between hospitalists and primary care providers (PCPs). These issues include, but are not limited to, missed test results, medication errors, inadequate follow up, and harm to the patient. PCPs are frequently unaware that their patient was hospitalized and they often do not receive a copy of the discharge summary. The authors of this paper did a qualitative study to analyze the barriers and solutions to care coordination between hospitalists and PCPs in North Carolina.