If the FTC joins in on enforcing HIPAA compliance, will that raise or lower the cost of providing dentalcare through paperless practices? What is your opinion? Jeff Smith, Director of Public Policy at College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), posted the following message on Healthcare Informatics today - revealing the FTC’s decision to join HHS as well as some states’ attorneys general in HIPAA compliance enforcement: “A unanimous Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ruling extends its authority over data security to include HIPAA covered entities. Historically, the role of the FTC has been to protect consumers and police unfair business practices…. Why it Matters: This ruling makes very real the possibility that hospitals and physicians who experience data breaches are subject to HIPAA enforcement actions, as well as penalties issued by the FTC.” healthcare-informatics/article/washington-debrief-ftc-may-review-penalize-hipaa-data-violations In part because of dentistry’s horrible information vacuum, there is no natural incentive for stakeholders to hold down the cost of open-ended mandates like HIPAA, which HIPAA-covered dentists never openly criticize. The secret costs of non-productive interference in dentistry for which nobody can be held accountable, are quietly tacked on to dental bills which are already considered incredibly high by our patients - the most vulnerable, yet least informed principals in dentalcare. All bleeding eventually stops. Have you noticed that already, paperless dentists almost never advertise the benefits of their electronic dental record systems? Ultimately, there are hard limits to wasteful spending on ineffective security mandates - which call for more wasteful spending on more ineffective mandates. Paper dental records (which are already outlawed in Wisconsin for cosmetic reasons) have always been cheaper and less dangerous than digital, and the value gap keeps widening. Here is the natural limit: Once dental patients outside Wisconsin start seeking dentists with paper records because of cost and/or safety concerns, they may never come back to digital. And neither will dentists. De-identify now. Let’s not allow people who don’t care for patients force us to return to paper. D. Kellus Pruitt DDS cc: American Dental Association
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 03:03:50 +0000
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