I'm not a lawyer and not one of the ones responsible for figuring out what needs to be done about HIPAA. I doubt there is a HIPAA mandate that this be done, but our network guy mentioned that this would be happening soon due to HIPAA concerns. The impression that I get is that HIPAA is very vague and there is a great deal of confusion about what is required to be compliant.

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced laptop restrictions are a bad thing. The firewall has protected us from most of the internet worms going around. Allowing people to bring laptops in and plug them into the network is a way that worms can get through the firewall.

As I see it, the ideal solution would be to have ethernet ports that were outside the firewall (or at least outside part of it), or to detect "outside" machines when they DHCP and treat them differently. Obviously they hospital would still want to block much of their access to the outside world, but access to the rest of the hospital protected network could be limited.

In any case, I'm not even an employee of the hospital - we just get space from them.

Ethan


[added]
In case anyone is interested, here is the website that I keep seeing linked when it comes to HIPAA:
http://www.hipaaadvisory.com/

[This message has been edited by ethanb (edited Feb 16, 2004).]