DHEC contacting clients of personal information breach WIS
23.04.10
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) - The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control continues to notify clients whose personal information was included on improperly discarded DHEC documents.
"We've already mailed letters to individuals, but we don't have complete mailing addresses for a small number of the clients," DHEC Commissioner Earl Hunter said. "While we work to gather this information, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 requires us to issue a broad notification to the affected area."
According to Hunter, private information of more than 1,800 people was included on DHEC documents that were discovered by a third party in a public, paper recycling container behind the DHEC building on Bull Street in Columbia. This third party gave the documents to another person, who returned them to DHEC.
"Agency policy requires that documents containing personal identifying information must be disposed of by shredding. Since these documents were not shredded according to agency policy, we requested that the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) investigate this matter," Hunter said. "During interviews with SLED, an employee admitted placing the documents into the recycling bin instead of taking them to the DHEC shredding facility. We immediately terminated this person's employment."
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3 ideas that could reduce health care costs by $40 billion
By Bill Jessee, MGMA president and CEO
It's no secret that health care costs are rising. In the United States this year, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) says the costs will be about $2.5 trillion – nearly 17 percent of the economy.
Fortunately, some expenses are avoidable. I recently attended the IOM workshop, "The Healthcare Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes," where I made a presentation about avoidable costs from delivery inefficiencies in physician offices. Changing practice operations, like changing physician practice patterns, is not easy, but by making steps in your medical practice to reduce waste, you'll help your bottom line as well as the nation's.
As a health care leader, you can control some types of waste in health care costs more easily than others. For example, waste occurring within your organization is remediable by your organization. But waste generated by interactions between and among health care organizations requires cooperation, and sometimes government action, to remediate. A recent Health Affairs article co-authored by MGMA reports that practices spend $68,274 per year per physician on health plan interactions alone.
That's why MGMA has urged Congress and the Obama administration to focus on three long-overdue steps toward administrative simplification that could save medical group practices $40 billion over 10 years:
Propose and finalize the National Plan Identifier regulation
Finalize the National Electronic Claim Attachment regulation
Require public and private payers to issue machine-readable health ID cards
1. Propose and finalize the National Plan Identifier regulation
Congress enacted the National Plan Identifier regulation in 1996 as a requirement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). However, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has failed to release even a proposed rule for a national health plan identifier, which could save physician practices $8.8 billion over a decade.
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As Steven A. Burd, the CEO of Safeway, reported in the June 12 issue of the Wall Street Journal, that company, a self-insured employer, has reduced employee contributions to health insurance for particular employees, as allowed by HIPAA (1996 Health
