Mark G. McCreary

I was lucky enough to participate in an excellent panel of healthcare professionals discussing how COVID-19 has impacted medical technology, methods of treatment and research, and patient privacy rights. If you are concerned with contract tracing applications, or what governments, employers, or private companies may be doing with data from contact tracing applications, we also had a terrific discussion on those topics.
Continue Reading Villanovans in Healthcare VIRTUAL Spring Speaker Series – DATA PRIVACY AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has published its “Exercise Starter Kit for Workshop on Reconstituting Operations,” which is available here.

This excellent resource will get many businesses started as
Continue Reading FEMA Issues Planning Exercise Starter Kit for Businesses Preparing to Resume Operations

Strong data encryption is a best practice, but according to new guidance from the UK’s data protection authority, it may not exempt you from General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) notification
Continue Reading Time To Update Your Data Breach Notification Practices

A number of employers in Illinois are involved in pending class action litigation regarding violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The BIPA, which was enacted in 2008, addresses the collection, use and retention of biometric information by private entities. Any information that is captured, stored, or shared based on a person’s biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints, iris scans, or blood type, is considered “biometric information.” The Illinois Legislature enacted the BIPA because biometric information is unlike any other unique identifier in that it can never be changed, even once it has been compromised.
Continue Reading Is Your Business in Compliance with the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act

On Tuesday, November 7th from 2:00 to 6:30, Fox Rothschild and Kroll will be presenting the CLE: Staying One Step Ahead: Developments in Privacy and Data. The CLE will take place at Fox Rothschild’s offices at 353 N. Clark Street in Chicago. If you are in the Chicago are on November 7th, I hope you will join us.
Continue Reading Upcoming CLE (Chicago): Staying One Step Ahead: Developments in Privacy and Data

Elizabeth Litten (Fox Rothschild Partner and HIPAA Privacy & Security Officer) and Mark McCreary (Fox Rothschild Partner and Chief Privacy Officer) will be presenting at the New Jersey Chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association on August 30, 2017, from 12:00-1:00 pm eastern time. The presentation is titled: “Can’t Touch That: Best Practices for Health Care Workforce Training on Data Security and Information Privacy.”
Continue Reading Upcoming Webinar: Can’t Touch That: Best Practices for Health Care Workforce Training on Data Security and Information Privacy

Eric Bixler has posted on the Fox Rothschild Physician Law Blog an excellent summary of the changes coming to Medicare cards as a result of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. Briefly, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must remove Social Security Numbers from all Medicare cards. Therefore, starting April 1, 2018, CMS will begin mailing new cards with a randomly assigned Medicare Beneficiary Identifier to replace the existing use of SSNs.
Continue Reading CMS Suggests Five Ways for Healthcare Providers to Prepare for New Medicare Cards

With over 123,000 computers infected, experts believe the “WannaCrypt” attacks have stopped after researchers registered a domain that the software checks before encrypting. However, nothing is stopping someone from revising the software to not require that check and releasing it into the wild. In other words, do not expect the infections to stop.
Continue Reading After the “WannaCrypt / WannaCry / WCry” Malware, Microsoft Pushes Update to Current and Unsupported Versions of Windows