In the health care industry, HIPAA Omnibus rule was launched to improve the quality of data. Organizations must have to adopt these new rules to secure the health record of patients. With this new rule, several organizations have upgraded their policies and procedures. The action was not taken in time in AHMC Healthcare and by this; the data of 729K individuals would neither have been reveal.
To ensure an appropriate security, HIPAA regulations need to cover all those entities so that sheltered information of various patients is not put in jeopardy. A proper risk audit must be examined and potential security risk must be reduced to its minimum level. Laptops are valuable source of many people as they store large amount of data and records and are easy to carry anywhere. The main reason of laptop stolen is that they have giant monetary value. Thieves are targeting doctors as well as other healthcare organizations to steal laptops which contains high amount of data. These data enrich laptops are much more valuable for thieves as compare to computer hardware. Whichever form of theft that contains unencrypted PHI is appraised as a HIPAA violation and it must have result in to essential form with handsome fine. AHMC healthcare have high security controls in their offices.
They operate six hospitals in California and Alhambra and their facilities are mated with security guards. Although, even if the security is strict but on 12th October current year, a thief walked in hospital and stole two laptops very smoothly. However, the office was covered with CCTV cameras, everything is monitored but this case is not recovered even they have reported to police. Due to this incident, 729,000 individuals are affected in AHMC healthcare and they have been communicated to aware of this incident so that they can bring past prescriptions along with them and their identities are monitored and safeguard by this. AHMC healthcare had suffer from great loss by this incident as they have thousands personnel data in laptops. They apologize with these individuals due to this loss and they are adopting rigorous security controls so that risk can be minimized.