Working towards being HIPAA compliant

Everyone connected with the healthcare industry understands the significance of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The act has several rules including the privacy rule that is used to ensure that health plans and healthcare providers keep the information of patients secure and protected. With the Office of Civil Rights being very strict about the enforcement of HIPAA, it is extremely crucial for all healthcare providers big or small to understand the importance of being HIPAA compliant. Formulated in 1996, HIPAA has undergone several amendments, but essentially pertains to the imposition of standardized security systems in place to safeguard sensitive patient information from unauthorized access. In short, the act pertains to the handling of healthcare records, information and all healthcare related transactions. Every healthcare provider needs to necessarily comply as per the security, privacy, and management guidelines laid out for all healthcare information.

Healthcare providers need to necessarily put in place security policies that ensures complete physical and network safety of patient information and restricts access of healthcare information to only the authorized personnel. HIPAA healthcare compliance is essential but it can also be quite a cumbersome ask for some healthcare providers. Therefore, such healthcare providers must seek solutions that can help

·         formulate appropriate procedures that can help realize their security policies,

·         install best security measures to adequately offer protection to sensitive data and information of patients,

·         set specific guidelines in place to ensure zero violation of HIPAA rules

·         prevent unauthorized access of information, and

·         set procedures in place to educate employees about the importance of HIPAA compliance. 

HIPAA compliance can be easily achieved provided health care providers opt for such solutions that can offer them best ways to continuously review compliance procedures and policies including review of servers and log audits along with development of compliance reports. With such solutions healthcare providers can easily set clearly defined policies with appropriate access controls. When such solutions can also assist in ably responding to security incidents, they can be of tremendous help to healthcare providers. Such a solution should necessarily account for an emergency or a contingency plan in place to tackle any security incident. The solution that a healthcare provider eventually opts for should also be well-equipped to offer ways to recover lost data.  

Working towards being HIPAA compliant can be made fairly easy provided health care providers become prudent about what they need in their HIPAA compliance solution. Opting for a solution that can help healthcare providers establish appropriate policies and implement proper compliance checks is definitely a step in the right direction. 

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