Thursday, February 28, 2019

Why Firms Tend to Neglect the Costs of Healthcare Compliance

Healthcare data are some of the most sensitive information, and people always expect the healthcare providers - such as hospitals, medical centers and clinics – to place great care and importance into making sure that their personal and medical data is kept safe and secure. So why is the case so that many firms seem to simply slack it off?

Healthcare providers hold a huge amount of sensitive data about patients – this data includes, sometimes, things that even the patients themselves don’t know. When and if this data falls into the possession of wrong people, this could be very bad as it can give a criminal with all the necessary data that they need to commit certain fraud or medical identity theft, suggests the healthcare lawyer Las Vegas. This the reason why there’s a set of strict rules & regulations at place known as the Protected Health Information or PHI, around protection of sensitive healthcare data. In the US, these set of rules are called HIPAA.


Every kind of healthcare entities and providers need to have a proper healthcare compliance program at place. Non-compliance of HIPAA norms could lead to high cost to the firm in the form of penalties amounting up to $50,000, in an event of breach taking place. Still, it is astounding that a huge number of healthcare providers continue to be non-compliant. Lack of resources is often one of the reasons why this happens and sometimes it is just that they just don’t know any better.