RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – The North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, Inc., this week released its security policy template for managing data on portable media devices, such as laptops, PDAs, and USB drives.
Entitled Managing Sensitive Electronic Information (SEI) on Portable Devices and Removable Media, the template details policies, standards and procedures for protecting SEI when its use is required outside of an enterprise’s fixed security and firewall protections.
“The protection of private health information is paramount,” said Holt Anderson, Executive Director of NCHICA. “This template is designed for use by health and care organizations to help address security issues that may arise when private health information is moved outside care settings.”
Experts assigned by the 19 members of the NCHICA’s “Mobile Memory Task Force” developed the new template. NCHICA says that the effort leveraged the best practices of the participating organizations to develop policies that help manage risk associated with the deployment and storage of SEI.
"Our success can be attributed to the combined member experience of the Task Force and the Privacy and Security Officials Workgroup,” said Larry LaBanc, Information Security Official for Novant Health and Chairman of the Task Force. “The release of this template has been eagerly anticipated by the many organizations that were part of the review process, and this detailed peer review adds to the strength and credibility of the document.”
The Task Force is comprised of representatives from the following member organizations:
- Alamance Regional Health System
- Carolinas HealthCare System
- Duke Clinical Research Institute
- Duke University Health System
- Forsythe Solutions Group
- Halifax Regional Medical Center
- Intel
- LabCorp
- Mission Hospitals
- Moses Cone Health System
- Novant Health
- Pitt County Memorial Hospital
- Rex Healthcare
- Southeastern Regional Medical Center
- UNC Healthcare
- UNC-Chapel Hill School of Medicine
- University of Virginia Health System
- VCU Health System/ACE
- Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
The NCHICA is a nonprofit consortium that serves as a neutral forum for healthcare information technology initiatives that improve healthcare in North Carolina.
Readers can find the new NCHICA template at http://www.nchica.org/HIPAAResources/Samples/Portal.asp.
