Next Phase of HIPAA Audits May Be Used As ‘Enforcement Tool,’ HHS Official Says

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) audits will become a mechanism for launching investigations into whether health-care organizations and their contractors are complying with privacy and security rules for protecting health-care data, a federal health-care official said Sept. 24.

“This will be an enforcement tool,” Iliana L. Peters, senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, told a joint conference with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The OCR’s first round of pilot audits in 2012 weren’t designed to spur enforcement activity but to inform the agency’s development of an ongoing audit ...