HIPAA BAA Proliferation

Oct 30, 2017

In a blog post, Rita Bowen, MA, RHIA, CHPS, CHPC, SSGB, Vice President of Privacy, Compliance and HIM Policy and Anthony Murray, CISSP, Vice President of Information Technology, are quoted on how to best handle the overwhelming task of BAA compliance.

There are a wide variety of forces at work in healthcare that are causing healthcare organizations to outsource more and more of their technology and services. No doubt the move to the cloud has brought in a number of new organizations that didn’t previously host PHI for a healthcare organization. This has added hundreds of outside companies who now have access to your patients’ PHI.

In a recent conversation I had with Rita Bowen and Anthony Murray from MRO at the AHIMA Annual Convention they also commented how many organizations were choosing to outsource their ROI and other services in order to keep their staffing ratios down. What a tremendous insight. We’ve all seen those charts (see the one at the left) that show the growth in provider count over time versus the growth in the number of administrators. We all see these charts and see it as a big problem in healthcare.

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Rita Bowen, MA, RHIA, CHPS, CHPC, SSGB

Bowen is an established author and speaker on healthcare privacy and security. She is an active member of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), having served as its President and Board Chair, as a member of the Board of Directors and of the Council on Certification, and currently sits on the AHIMA Foundation Board of Directors. In her role at MRO, Bowen works with clients to ensure HIM policies and procedures are to code. Additionally, Bowen serves as the company’s Privacy and Compliance Officer (CPO).