HIPAA Blog

[ Friday, September 21, 2007 ]

 

Indiana wants you (to protect PHI): Like his counterpart in Texas, the Indiana Attorney General is going after businesses who are not tidy with their trash. Specifically, he's going after pharmacies, and the pharmacists who man them, for throwing away papers containg social security numbers and other patient information without shredding them. News crews did the original dumpster-diving. The complaints against the individual pharmacists (one is here) indicate that the trashing of the PHI without destroying it violates HIPAA, and that state law requires the pharmacist to ensure the operation of the pharmacy within the requirements of all laws; so, he's not charging them with violating HIPAA (he can't really; only HHS can do that), but he is charging them with violating state law because they violated HIPAA. Nice bootstrapping.

Jeff [9:41 AM]

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