How to work with EPHI data on your laptop!
The obvious answer to this one shouldnt have identifying patient information on your laptop, while this seems like a very reasonable solution often this isnt practical, unless your systems have a method of exporting and obscuring the eighteen data identifiers.

What if you actually need the patient information as your working on insurance billing? How can you secure it to reduce a data loss scenario?

Here are at Lab Portal Company we recommend if you MUST have HIPAA data on a laptop or any other portable medium use TrueCrypt.
TrueCrypt creates:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.
Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).
Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.
Encryption can be hardware-accelerated on modern processors.

So in the event of a loss your EHPI data would be virtually impossible to resurect, but than again not loosing your data would be best....