Friday, May 20, 2005

Three Mile Smile

From Genetic Engineering News (okay, I go to a lot of ...unusual places) comes an interesting report about Delta Dental's new online services. As many of you know, California is one of the states which have stricter privacy laws than HIPAA requires, and so the more restrictive rules apply. If you follow current events, you will recall that privacy violations in California result in pretty severe penalties and required remediation. Delta is attempting to remove the employer from the PHI loop by allowing their enrollees direct web access to their records.
My first thought was the obvious one, and was answered by this:

"New encryption software, launched last month, encodes all e-mails that contain electronic protected health information (ePHI) sent by Delta Dental to enrollees, benefits managers, brokers, dentists -- anyone receiving ePHI. This encoding will protect private information from being accidentally read or misused if an e-mail is intercepted by an unauthorized individual."

Full story here.

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