FDA Compliance 2020 - HIPAA Audit and Enforcement Update - New Rules and New Directions in Enforcement

Overview:
In this session we will review the enforcement actions taken by HHS and state Attorneys General to illustrate the issues concerned and explain how to avoid them, and the penalties that can result when they are not avoided.
Issues will be explored in depth in several areas in order to explain the regulatory requirements and the means for meeting them.
We will also discuss the HIPAA audit program and how it works, and discuss the areas that caused the most issues in the 2012 audits and the areas that were targeted in the 2016 audits. We will explore what kind of issues were most prevalent and what kind of entities had the most problems, and show where entities need to improve their compliance the most. We will also explore the typical risk issues that lead to breaches of health information and see how those issues may be targets for auditors and enforcement action in the future.
We will examine the updated 2018 HIPAA Audit Protocol as well as other questionnaires that have been used in the past and may be used to help prepare an organization for a future review. We will present methods for using the contents of the HIPAA Audit Protocol to build your own compliance plan by extracting the contents and relating your compliance activities and documentation directly to the questions that might be asked, thereby creating a compliance management tool to ensure continued compliance improvement.
The results of prior HHS audits and enforcement actions (and their penalties) will be discussed, including recent actions involving multi-million-dollar fines and settlements. A plan for attaining compliance will be presented. The steps to follow to prepare for an audit and respond to an audit request will be outlined. In addition, upcoming trends in information security risks will be discussed so you can start to plan for the work you'll need to do to stay in compliance and keep patient information private and secure.