Industry Groups Urge Rescission of Proposed HIPAA Security Rule Updates
In February, a coalition of healthcare organizations sent a letter to President Donald J. Trump and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (the Letter), urging the immediate rescission of a proposed update to the Security Rule under HIPAA . The update is aimed at strengthening safeguards for securing electronic protected health information. According to The HIPAA Journal , the data breach trend in the healthcare industry over the past 14 years is up, not down. This is the case despite the HIPAA Security Rule having been in effect since 2005. The HIPAA Journal goes on to provide some sobering statistics: Between October 21, 2009, when OCR first started publishing summaries of data breach reports on its “Wall of Shame”, and and December 31, 2023, 5,887 large healthcare data breaches have been reported. On January 22, 2023, the breach portal listed 857 data breaches as still; under investigation. This time last year there were 882 breach...