GigaOM » digital-technology

Are health care companies prepared for the new HIPAA privacy and security rules?

Ki Mae Heussner — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:58:12 +0000

In a long-awaited announcement, the Department of Health and Human Services this week said it made the “most sweeping” changes to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) since it was first passed in 1996.

The previous HIPAA rules applied to healthcare providers, doctors and insurance companies. But under the new rules, their “business associates” – contractors or service providers – also have direct specific compliance obligations, said Kirk Nahra, a partner at Washington, D.C.-based Wiley Rein LLP who specializes in health care. That could include electronic health record companies, telehealth companies and others that contract with hospitals or insurance companies.

Even though the ruling has been expected for some time, companies in the industry are all over the map when it comes to being prepared. Some have the security infrastructure, policies and documentation in place, he said, but others have a ways to go before being in compliance. Although the act goes into effect in March, companies don’t need to be compliant until September.

To meet the new standards of the law, Nahra said, companies may need to evaluate the extent to which they encrypt data, train all employees on privacy and security, develop appropriate procedures for the disposal of information, designate a security official and implement appropriate contracts with subcontractors, among other tasks.

The report itself is not for the feint of heart – it clocks in at 563 pages. But anyone in the business of health care information will want to be aware of the changes they contain.

“They need to consider whom they are doing business with, how they will obtain information from those in the circle, whether they can sell their product to enough people without getting into the circle and how to build sufficient confidence with these other entities (and consumers),” Nahra added.

As digital technology changes how patient information is collected and stored, and how quickly it can be moved and compromised, the new rules attempt to strengthen safeguards and expand the pool of parties held to the highest security and privacy requirements.

For example, they raise the maximum penalty for negligence, strengthen data breach notification requirements under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and provide new requirements on how patient information can be used for fundraising and marketing.

“It’s a big deal,” said Nahra. “The government hasn’t been incredibly aggressive about enforcing it, but they’re getting more aggressive.”

Image by Chad McDermott via Shutterstock.

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Saving the world with tech? It’s getting easier all the time

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 12:00:09 +0000

Sir Ronald Cohen is on a mission. Back in the 1970s he was one of the key players in the development of the venture capital industry in the UK, setting up Apax Partners. But now he’s using the approach he developed financing businesses and delivering a return to investors to tackle social issues.

When you listen to Cohen (below) talk about it, the scale of the challenge is what interests him. He sees social problems getting bigger but charities and the public sector less able to try new approaches because their time is spent servicing existing needs. So 10 years ago he set about proving that ‘social investment’ could have an impact. He co-founded Bridges and the Social Investment Business and played a role in the creation of social impact bonds that are now spreading to other countries.

But it’s only now that social investment is really taking off in the technology world. In the past it’s focussed on debt based investment which isn’t suited to high growth technology startups. Earlier this year Big Society Capital (of which Sir Ronnie is Chairman) was set up with money from dormant UK bank accounts to be a £600 million ($965m) investment bank for social investment. One of their first moves was into Nesta Impact Investments which, last week announced their first £17.5 million ($28m) seed fund. In tech terms it’s not huge, but what’s interesting is that it’s the first social investment fund that will make equity investments focused on seed stage technology startups.

This all comes at the same time as prominent venture capitalists are increasingly talking about social issues as promising markets. In the UK Nic Brisbourne of DFJ Esprit has written about the growing interest in healthcare technology. And in the US, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson have pushed founders to come to them with ‘hacking education’ ideas and have made a number of investments. Investors like Mitch Kapor have also shifted their focus towards social issues – Kapor Capital is overtly an ‘impact’ seed fund. In his now famous piece about ‘software eating the world’, Marc Andreessen writes that, “Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation”.

Even at the really early stage support is available. When we wrote the Startup Factories a year ago, accelerator programmes in Europe were mainly for digital technology in general but it was clear they would develop into particular verticals as was starting to happen in the US. Just this week, for example, there are Demo Days in San Francisco for Greenstart, Imagine K-12 and Code for America Accelerator.

And sure enough, Healthbox has opened up a London branch, HealthXL accelerator run by Startupbootcamp in Dublin has just opened applications and Bethnal Green Ventures (which I help run) has just launched six new tech startups trying to solve social and environmental problems.

Angel networks like that run by ClearlySo and big industry conferences for social investment like SOCAP held in San Francisco in September show that a real ecosystem is developing around this both in the US and Europe.

The result? If you want to use digital technology to solve some of the world’s biggest problems like how we educate the next generation, improve the health of our elders or tackle climate change, you don’t need to apologise for it when seeking investment. That’s a welcome change.

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E-books, innovation and antitrust

Paul Sweeting — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 23:58:10 +0000

What’s happening in the e-book market is not fundamentally different from what happened in the music industry. The retail price of recorded music has plunged thanks to digital technology and the record labels lost market power. At the same time, innovation has flourished at the retail level

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Building a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 07:01:01 +0000

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