In previous articles in this series, we have explored some of the HIPAA rules and regulations that affect the everyday lives of dental practitioners. As most dentists are aware, the data that resides in your office is the most critical data you own: the patient records, schedule, documents, etc. are the lifeblood of your practice. The question is, what are you doing to protect that data? In my mind, there are three areas to concentrate on: 1. A firewall. This sounds easy, right? Just install a HIPAA-certified firewall and be done with it...except, no such animal exists. As a matter of fact,...

As we have seen in the previous articles, there are numerous HIPAA rules and regulations that must be followed. Non compliance can often lead to fines and penalties that can be quite substantial. However, in my mind, there is nothing more devastating to a practice than needing to declare a breach. Data breaches have become common. There are reports in the news almost weekly about breaches in large corporations such as Target and Neiman Marcus. While these breaches can be upsetting to consumers, they don’t fall into the HIPAA rules as they don’t involve protected health information. A breach at a...

Of all the HIPAA rules and regulations that we will be discussing in upcoming articles, in my mind, having a contingency plan is easily the most critical. In dentistry, we use various terms like data backup, disaster recovery, and practice continuity, but they all mean the same thing: you need to have a solid backup of your critical practice data. Of course, dental practices can and should have backup plans in place, for mostly reasons that go well beyond HIPAA compliance: any practice that loses their critical practice data would most likely not recover from that, and a practice that doesn’t...

Welcome to the first in an ongoing series on HIPAA compliance for dental practices. As many of you know, HIPAA rules and regulations have completely changed the ways that dental offices need to operate. There are a number of problems, however. First and foremost, the sheer volume and complexity of the rules can be overwhelming. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of rules, many of them well beyond what a dentist can achieve. Related to this, there are unfortunately a number of companies and sales reps whose sole focus is to sell products and services, quite often based on...