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HHS Issues Privacy Enforcement Data
May 13, 2008
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights has released updated statistics showing how it handles complaints of violations of the HIPAA privacy rule.
OCR received 32,595 complaints from after the rule’s compliance date of April 14, 2003, through 2007. Of those complaints, 25,536 were resolved. OCR offered no explanation of the status of the remaining complaints.
Of the resolved complaints, no action was taken on 17,337, or 68%. These complaints were inappropriate for investigation because they covered actions that occurred before the compliance date, involved entities not covered under the privacy rule, involved alleged activity that would not violate the rule or were not filed in a timely manner, OCR says. Some complaints also were not investigated because OCR could not confirm the identity of the person making the complaint, or OCR needed to disclose the person’s name to obtain certain information and the person would not consent to the disclosure.
In total, OCR investigated 8,199 complaints between mid-April 2003 and the end of 2007. No violation of the rule was found in 2,690 cases. In 5,509 other instances, the covered entity took corrective action to correct violations. To date, federal officials have won two criminal convictions against individuals for serious violations of the privacy rule.
For more information, visit hhs.gov/ocr.
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