This is post 4 of a 10 post series on the top 10 reasons you should consider outsourcing your coding.
New York Presbetyrian Hospital and Columbia University had a data breach that affected 6,800 people in May of 2014 after a physician attempted to simply deactivate a personal computer on the network containing ePHI. Due to the lack of safegaurds within the network, the data was presented online for everyone to see.
Since 2009, when the HIPAA breach notification requirement took effect, nearly 31.4 million people have had their protected health information compromised in privacy and security breaches. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the HHS division responsible for enforcing HIPAA, has levied more than $25.1 million in fines against healthcare organizations responsible for violating the privacy and security rules. The constant threat of an OCR audit looms for every healthcare professional. One of the most common places to receive an audit is within the medical coding department of your facility. Reciving a medical coding audit is one of the largest concerns coding managers have, and a large reason why they keep their coding in house. The fear of transmitting ePHI outside of their facility and increasing the risk of compromising the information outweighs the benefits of outsourcing the medical coding to a company like Aviacode. This is a valid concern, and one that should be deeply vetted before ever considering hiring a 3rd party company to take care of your medical coding.
