How To Respond to Data Breaches

A lot of people have really liked this whitepaper on the 6 Reality Checks of HIPAA compliance. It’s a good download for those concerned about their HIPAA readiness. It will wake you up to the fact that you need to be ready and compliant with HIPAA.

Mac McMillan recently did a great HIPAA compliance interview with me where he said “A little bit of prevention goes a heck of a long way to preventing a bad event.” That’s great advice and if you read this whitepaper I think you’ll be woken up to the need to do a little more than you’re doing today to be HIPAA compliant.

While prevention is better, I was intrigued by this article (annoying registration required) in Health Data Management that talks about what to do in the event of a data breach. I love this quote from Rita Bowen, Senior VP at Healthport, “Breaches are inevitable.” It’s true. Despite your best efforts, breaches happen in every organization large and small.

Rita also points out that the key to a data breach is to have a system in place to “learn what went wrong and fix it.” I’ve always found HIPAA to be pretty generous with mistakes. As the HIPAA name says, it’s more about accountability than anything else. If you’re accountable for the decisions you’re making, then it’s more lenient than a lot of laws out there.

The article also gives three insights worth considering if you experience a data breach:

  • Honesty, the best policy
  • Keep Asking, “What if?”
  • Go the Extra Mile

All of these are great advice. If you go the extra mile and are honest about what happened, then you’ll usually be able to recover from a data breach. If you try and cover it up or hide what happened, then that will often come back to haunt you and damage you much more than if you were just honest and up front about what happened.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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