Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Overview

Imagine you are working with some health data to put together a report for your manager. It’s due the next day, but it is getting late. You decide to put the data you need on a thumb drive and catch your bus home so you can finish the report from there. When you arrive home, you can’t find the thumb drive. You’re annoyed but not too worried about it. The next day, you finish the report and turn it in to your manager. After that, it’s business as usual. A few weeks later, you hear a news story about your company. The company has allegedly breached health data and is being investigated by regulators. You wonder what is going on. Your IT department begins an urgent, high-priority investigation. They quickly track the leak back to you! That thumb drive you lost fell into the wrong hands. Now, you are in danger of losing your job, patients feel like their trust has been violated, and your company is losing some of its best customers due to the negative publicity. If only you could go back in time! You would definitely do things differently, right? The goal of this course is to prevent incidents like this from happening in the first place.