HHS Proposes Important Changes To Key Aspects Of HIPAA Privacy Rule

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the agency that enforces the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), is the latest federal agency to jump on the HHS rulemaking bandwagon issuing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on December 10, 2020, that proposes pivotal changes to key standards, definitions, and patient rights under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which are geared toward promoting care coordination and value-based care, and empowering patients with greater access to their health information.

As we recently flagged, even amidst the chaos of a global pandemic, multiple HHS agencies, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and most recently, CMS and OIG, have focused their attention in 2020 on facilitating and enforcing patients' rights to access their health information, encouraging