Covered entities (CEs) and business associates (BAs) are eagerly awaiting the appearance of several HIPAA-related announcements as well as proposed and final rules wending their way through the federal approval and publication process. These include a final regulation that would make significant changes to the privacy rule, including removing providers’ obligation to obtain a signature from patients upon receipt of their notice of privacy practices.
At least one proposed regulation under development—actually, a request for information (RFI) that, in part, is more than 10 years late—should be published soon. On March 29, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) updated its entry for a kind of omnibus RFI as “concluded,” which means it could be published in the Federal Register within days.[1]
The RFI is the first step in completing both a task the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has left undone since 2009 and another for which it is not nearly as late. The text of the RFI will not be known until it is published in the Federal Register. But the broad outlines of what it will contain are available from the OIRA website and have been discussed by OCR officials.