To be or not to be’ HIPAA compliant! The choice is yours

HIPAA, the short form for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, introduced by the US Congress in 1996, was to set a standard to safeguard the privacy of patient information and regulating the way healthcare providers use that information. HIPAA essentially focuses on safeguarding the patient’s healthcare coverage and also on the patient’s rights as to how they can convey, share and store their information. HIPAA created certain safeguards that ensured that any patient-sensitive data was well protected. HIPAA applies to all medical practitioners, medical enterprises, health insurance enterprises, and a host of others handling patient-medical information.

Health care enterprises are worried and apprehensive of HIPAA violations, which may occur because of intentional, unintentional accidental errors or due to technical errors. Intentional or unintentional the law is ruthless! Any kind of HIPAA violation can affect an enterprise adversely. Therefore, enterprises would do well to put in place a team that would be in charge of managing and ensuring the complete enforcement of HIPAA compliance measures and regulations. 

It is necessary for all healthcare enterprises to safeguard access to sensitive health-care information; they need to have a firm grip over systems and processes handling patient healthcare data.  Healthcare enterprises need to be aware of the appropriate steps for ensuring proper healthcare regulatory compliance. Risk analysis conducted by health care enterprises exposes vulnerabilities and vulnerability scanning in the existing systems. Such analyses help in fixing the identified vulnerabilities and sustaining data integrity and confidentiality. 

To achieve health care compliance, health care providers need to ensure that they constantly review their compliance procedures and policies - auditing transaction logs, compliance reports, configuration settings, role-based access controls, security incident reports and effectiveness of incident handling and disaster recovery mechanisms. 

Being HIPAA compliant is not difficult. To be or not to be is your choice. All you need to do is to pick up the right tool for setting up policies and automated tools to check compliance periodically.

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