The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Tuesday that it has issued a Notice of Final Determination finding that Cignet Health of Prince George’s County, Maryland (Cignet) violated the HIPAA Privacy Rule.  HHS imposed a $4.3 million civil money penalty on Cignet for the violations—the first…

Today the District Court for the Northern District of Alabama dismissed the class action lawsuit filed against our client, Cable One, Inc., for lack of subject matter jurisdiction because the named plaintiff lacked standing.  The litigation arose out of a limited test of NebuAd Inc.’s “deep packet inspection” technology, which was used to create anonymous,…

A total of 225 breaches of protected health information (PHI) affecting 6,067,751 individuals have been recorded since the HIPAA breach notification rule was issued in August 2009 pursuant to the HITECH Act, according to a report by Redspin, a provider of HIPAA risk analysis and IT assessment services.
According to the report:

• Single breaches affecting

…

The Article 29 Working Party, comprising data protection authorities from each of the EU Member States and the European Data Protection Supervisor, has reiterated concerns about aspects of Passenger Name Record (PNR) agreements between the EU and the US, Canada and Australia. Under the agreements, airlines must allow authorities in the US, Canada and Australia…

In our final post on what pharmaceutical companies should know about the forthcoming HIPAA/HITECH regulations, we will discuss provisions in the proposed rule relating to the sale of protected health information.  We previously covered the Department of Health and Human Service’s  (HHS) proposed treatment of communications about currently prescribed drugs, remunerated treatment communications,…

This is the fourth in our series on provisions of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed rule implementing the HITECH Act that, if included in the final rule, are likely to have the greatest impact on the business operations of pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies.  We previously covered HHS’s proposed treatment…

As expected, this year is shaping up to be a busy year on privacy.  As we noted in an earlier post, many Congressional members on both sides of the aisle are focusing on privacy issues.  We still expect Senator Kerry to introduce comprehensive privacy legislation in the next few weeks and we understand Senator…