Last month an external electronic data storage device containing patient health information for approximately 15,500 Northern California members of health insurance company Kaiser Permanente was stolen from an employees car at the employees home in Sacramento, Calif.

Organizations should act prior to the implementation of the new (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) HIPAA compliance guideline changes for 2010 and consistently monitor their facilities in order to make an easier transition and avoid the extended penalties that are now being proposed, said HIPAA privacy and security consult Grant Peterson during a Jan. 13 Webinar on the guidelines.

Connecticut Attorney General (AG) Richard Blumenthal announced Wednesday that he is suing Health Net of Connecticut for failing to secure private patient medical records and financial information involving 446,000 Connecticut enrollees and promptly notify consumers exposed by the security breach.

Ellen Makar of Yale-New Haven Health System, Conn., and Sandra Ng of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center were both selected by the Alliance for Nursing Informatics to participate in a two-year Nursing Informatics Emerging Leaders Program.

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society have chosen William Spooner, senior vice president and CIO at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, Calif., as the recipient of the 2009 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year Award.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) intends to solicit and award a task order contract to acquire services for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), in order to re-identify a health Information Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) de-identified dataset.

Siemens Healthcare announced yesterday that Henri"Rik" Primo, director of marketing and strategic relationships, image and knowledge management, has been re-elected as chair of the medical imaging informatics section of the Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA).

A software application integrated with an EHR might display data to physicians about ambient public health conditions and prompt appropriate management, treatment and reporting processes based on a calculation that considered patient factors in a specific epidemiologic situation could be important for future clinical decision support (CDS) systems, according to a study in the January edition of the Journal of the American Medical informatics Association.