Welcome to the new Jon Tomes HIPAA & HITECH Blog! Please sign up to receive an email notification when I post something new. And please post your comments, questions, and concerns. I plan to post at least weekly and more often as events occur, as the law changes, and as you post your comments, questions, and concerns.

Besides the free content on the public portion of the blog, I am adding a premium membership section to the website. There, premium members can download new policies as I write them, ask HIPAA questions, get discounts on my HIPAA compliance products, including books, CDs with policies and other documents, training videos, and the like, and read more in-depth articles about new risks and other HIPAA issues. Among the new materials initially appearing are an alternate communication policy, a cell phone policy, a disclosure to law enforcement policy with request form, an evaluation policy, a handling requests for restriction policy, a privacy of deceased patients policy, and a social networking policy. The premium member articles include one on the time trap in attempting to get the incentives for adopting an electronic health record and one in progress on the risks of cloud computing.

The premium membership price is quite reasonable—just $95 a year or free with the purchase of my Health Information Compliance Library. For those who join, please let me know what I can do to improve the premium membership portion of the website as we go along. Thanks.

For those of you that follow my blog without joining the premium membership, I hope that you find the public materials helpful. In addition to HIPAA news and guidance, I will post questions that I receive and answers that you may find helpful because most of them tend to be issues that many HIPAA covered entities and business associates face.