TGIF

Following up on yesterday's post, here is a link to Health Data Management which provides a CMS explanation of the Medicare changes made by the New Years Day tax law that provided another year of the doc fix to Medicare Part B payments.

Here is a link to a Kaiser Health News flowchart that explains the IRS's approach to the Affordable Care Act's share responsibility / pay or play provisions discussed in a recent FEHBlog post.

Finally, on the HIPAA front, ihealthbeat reports that CMS has announced that it will delay enforcement of two HIPAA standard transaction operating rules for three months (until March 31, 2012). The standard operating rules in this case for eligibility and claim status are intended to replace the multiplicity of individual health plan implementation guides for the transaction standards.

Securityinfowatch.com reports that

The Hospice of North Idaho (HONI) has agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) $50,000 to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Security Rule. This is the first settlement involving a breach of unprotected electronic protected health information (ePHI) affecting fewer than 500 individuals.

In this case, the Hospice had a laptop with unencrypted data on 441 patients stolen in 2010.  The article points out that the government now has a website that discusses the myriad HIPAA security risks of mobile devices. It's worth a look.