Eric Fader wrote an article, "A New Era Of Health Care Privacy And Security Enforcement," for Law360. The article is about the significance of Henry Schein Practice Solutions Inc.'s $250,000 settlement of Federal Trade Commission charges that it "falsely advertised the level of encryption it provided to protect patient data." As previously discussed here, the company was charged with deceptively marketing its Dentrix G5 software to dentists as providing industry-standard encryption that would help dental practices satisfy their obligations under HIPAA to secure patients' protected health information when, in fact, Dentrix did not use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Eric writes that the enforcement action should serve as a wake-up call to any health care provider or vendor that may have thought that all it needed to do in order to protect the privacy and security of protected health information was to comply with HIPAA regulations.

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