HIPAA BAA Proliferation

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. In order to combat this perception, it’s no surprise that healthcare organizations are trying to keep these admin to doctor ratios at a better level. One way they’re massaging those numbers is to outsource more of their services. We could talk about whether this is a good strategy or not, but that’s a topic for another blog post. The reality is that these ratios and many other drivers are causing organizations to work with a growing number of outside companies. I was talking with a hospital CIO who told me that they had 300 different health IT systems. As healthcare organi...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EMR AHIMA Anthony Murray BAA BAAs Business Associates Healthcare BA HIPAA BAA MRO Rita Bowen Source Type: blogs