Rita Bowen, vice president of privacy, compliance and health information management policy, MRO Corp.
As federal regulators intensify their focus on compliance with requirements to provide patients with access to their health information, healthcare organizations need to sort through a variety of emerging challenges, says health information management and privacy expert Rita Bowen.
The Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights has issued more than a dozen HIPAA settlements - ranging from $3,500 to $160,000 - in cases involving covered entities failing to provide timely access to a patient's requested health information.
Under HIPAA, covered entities must within 30 days fulfill patients' requests for copies of their health information in the format of their choice. But under a proposal issued by HHS OCR this month to modify the HIPAA Privacy Rule, that compliance timeframe could potentially be reduced to 15 days (see: