OCR Settles Sixteenth Investigation in HIPAA Right of Access Initiative

Recently, the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) settled its sixteenth enforcement action in its HIPAA Right of Access Initiative.  The OCR announced this initiative as a priority in 2019 to support individuals’ rights to timely access their health records under the HIPAA Privacy Rule.  In that regard, the Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a HIPAA rule change to facilitate access requests, under which Covered Entities must respond to access requests more quickly, and may have to send PHI or make PHI accessible to a third party at the individual’s direction without jumping through all of the currently existing hoops.

The proposed changes were summarized in a recent post to our privacy and data security blog, Practical Privacy.