Jonathan P. Tomes's Blog

I talked about my first novel, Lawful Orders, in my blog post on March 9, 2012. Since then, Veterans Press has made it available for you on Amazon Kindle. You can also order it from Amazon Kindle through Veterans Press.

I am currently working on “Anita, the Art Bounty Hunter (working title),” a novel about an art dealer who is hired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help with sting operations against fraudulent art dealers. Our heroine, Anita, and the FBI agent, Paul, are posing as husband and wife on a cruise ship where a dealer auctions overpriced and sometimes fraudulent art to passengers. It’s great fun to write! If any of you have horror stories or even pleasant anecdotes about having been on a cruise that sells art, please let me know.

My first vampire romance, “A Unit of Blood,” is finished if I could ever get my editor to edit it. And I am halfway through with writing the sequel. I also have another short story finished and awaiting editing. My editor has this strange theory that she should first edit my nonfiction HIPAA books, which actually make a decent amount of money! The book that she is currently editing for me is “Mental and Behavioral Health and HIPAA: An Uneasy Alliance.”

I talked about my first novel, Lawful Orders, in my blog post on March 9, 2012. Since then, Veterans Press has made it available for you on Amazon Kindle. You can also order it from Amazon Kindle through Veterans Press.

I am currently working on “Anita, the Art Bounty Hunter (working title),” a novel about an art dealer who is hired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help with sting operations against fraudulent art dealers. Our heroine, Anita, and the FBI agent, Paul, are posing as hus...

The Department of Health and Human Services (“DHHS”) announced yesterday in a press release that, after a lengthy investigation, the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) had reached a settlement agreement with the Phoenix Cardiac Surgery, P.C. (“PCS”), an Arizona for-profit corporation that is a covered entity under HIPAA. Under the terms of the settlement, PCS agreed to pay $100,000 and to follow a corrective action plan laid out by OCR. The investigation began February 19, 2009, as a result of a...

First, thanks to the Premium Member who suggested that we clearly identify new content on the Premium Member section of the website. We always welcome suggestions as to how to improve the website to make it more helpful to you. We certainly want to be user friendly and not user surly. So look for the new "New" symbol.

Second, I posted a new policy on the Premium Member section of the website, and it's an important one. Because Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee was recently fined $1.5...

Veterans Press just made my latest short story available on Amazon Kindle: Kevin Goes to Jump School. Our social media manager and epublishing editor, Meg McCart, aptly summarized the plot for the blurb for Kindle as follows: "When Kevin's boyfriend decides to join the Army and enter jump school, Kevin decides it's better to trade flower arranging for fatigues than to lose the love of his life." Can now-Private Kevin jump out of a perfectly good airplane to keep Sean?

Veterans Press now has...

Several sources reporting on a recent breach in the Kansas City area appear to misunderstand HIPAA. Apparently, a former abortion doctor threw the paper records of abortions that he had conducted into a dumpster at an elementary school here in Overland Park, Kansas, practically down the street and around the corner from my office. The bin contained more than 1,000 records, many of minors, including names, birth dates, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, emergency family contacts...

If I don’t have a topic for a blog entry, all I apparently have to do is to wait a few days, and someone will have a major breach for me to talk about. This time, it’s Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC, although the hospital itself may not have violated HIPAA.

Apparently, someone stole a laptop from a former contractor that contained PHI of 34,503 patients. The PHI included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, identification numbers, medical record numbers, birthdates, admissi...

If I don't have a topic for a blog entry, all I apparently have to do is to wait a few days, and someone will have a major breach for me to talk about. This time, it's Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC, although the hospital itself may not have violated HIPAA.

Apparently, someone stole a laptop from a former contractor that contained PHI of 34,503 patients. The PHI included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, identification numbers, medical record numbers, birthdates...

On March 22, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Mike Whicker, author of three published novels and one more very close to publication. His stand-alone novel is Proper Suda, about a young woman who comes to live with her aunt in Evansville, Indiana, early in the 20th Century, which combines a mystery with great storytelling about living there during that period. The other two novels, Blood of the Reich and Invitation to Valhalla, and the forthcoming one, Return to Valhalla, are a...

Because of the $1 million fine that Massachusetts General paid for the "million dollar subway ride," in which a worker took protected health information ("PHI") home to work on and left it on the subway, other hefty fines for the loss of electronic protected health information ("EPHI"), such as on laptops, and the fact that the single biggest category of breaches reported to the Department of Health and Human Services ("DHHS") under the HITECH Act's requirement to report breaches of...