Three Ways To Tune Up Your HIPAA Compliance

Shannon Hartsfield Salimone is a Partner in the Tallahassee office

As the HHS Office for Civil Rights continues to issue press releases about HIPAA settlements and enforcement actions, now is a good time to re-examine HIPAA and data privacy compliance efforts. Here are three things covered entities and business associates can do to help reduce the chances of coming to the attention of OCR:

1) Make sure your compliance program actually works.

Organizations can have HIPAA compliance programs and data security policies and procedures that look great on paper, but they will be of no benefit to the organization unless they are actually effective. The government has recently issued some guidance documents that may be useful to CIOs and IT administrators that want to evaluate a compliance programs effectiveness. For example, the Department of Justice recently published some sample questions that its Fraud Section has found relevant in examining a corporate compliance