PCASSO—the Patient Centered Access to Secure Systems Online project—was an early trailblazer in using the Internet to give patients and providers instant access to medical records. The project started in 1996, a time when most people considered the Internet an unsecure and scary place to post a person’s most private and sensitive information.

Now, more than 10 years since its creation, PCASSO can be more fully appreciated as an innovator in technology that many hospitals have only recently begun to adopt.

As complex health data exchanges such as health record banks, health information exchanges, and personal health records begin to gain ground, PCASSO deserves a retrospective look as an early project that promoted patient access to health records and demonstrated it could be done security over the Internet, says Dixie Baker, PhD, former principle investigator with the PCASSO project and senior vice president and chief technology officer for health solutions at Science Applications International Corporation. The project anticipated many of today’s security threats and incorporated a high level of protection that many contemporary portals do not. (more…)

Get hip with HIPAA.

That’s just one of the taglines attached to Sharp Healthcare’s HIPAA education modules. Photos from the age of hip—the late 1960s and early 1970s—permeate the online HIPAA training modules. Musicians Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan and era-TV icons like the Get Smart cast mingle with privacy requirements and confidentiality factoids.

The hip-themed training is just one theme in a series of HIPAA privacy, security, and confidentiality training modules at the San Diego-based facility.

The incorporation of a new theme each year assures that Sharp’s staff of 12,000 employees learn more than how to fall asleep during training, says Paul Belton, RHIA, Sharp’s vice president of corporate compliance and creator of the unique training programs.

“All this is to just try and keep this fresh,” Belton says. “You come up with something that would be tasteful and flavorful to them to [avoid] the dry and boring education modules that are so typical.”

Keeping a facility’s HIPAA education program interesting year after year can be a challenge for privacy officers. They must develop interesting, comprehensive programs that stick for new employees as well as fresh refresher programs for current staff. (more…)

An Arkansas woman who was the first in her state to be prosecuted under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was sentenced to probation and community service.

Andrea Smith, a 25-year-old woman from Trumann, AR, was sentenced on December 3, 2008, to two years probation and 100 hours of community service for accessing and disclosing a patient’s health information for personal gain, according to Cherith Beck, public information officer with the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. (more…)