HIPAA / Healthcare Industry

Sensitive patient health information is extremely valuable to hackers, causing the frequency and severity of these kinds of breaches to continually increase. In fact, 142 healthcare data breaches exposed over 3.15 million patient records during the second quarter of 2018. As these data breaches continue to grow over the years, the need of medical practices to ensure proper protection and handling of such personal information

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITRUST) legislation applies HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) to a variety of organizations. Through HIPAA’s growth of reaching a larger community, HIPAA compliance was made a nearly-universal legislation by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). Whether you are a healthcare facility or another type of service platform, you should know how best to handle HIPAA compliance rules and regulations.

The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been the gold standard for healthcare regulations and patients rights since the laws were passed on August 21, 1996 in the United States. These laws have been updated and added to several times over the course of the past 22+ years with the intention of keeping patients and their personal information safe. It is similar to the PCI DSS requirements that have constantly being altered to protect consumer payment card information.

Most people would agree that basic human rights include privacy. However, social media, computers, and the Internet have eroded the traditional privacy and security barriers put in place. Documents can be shared with a simple click and access granted with credentials. Society can no longer dictate, in many cases, who or what has access to Personal Identifiable Information (PII).This especially affects healthcare provider entities, which up until the late 1990s and early 2000s kept most records in paper format.

With the new ease of electronic communication, security can sometimes fall to the wayside. To ensure patient confidentiality within these new technological parameters, the U.S. government established the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996. In addition to mandating health administrative guidelines, HIPAA included specific privacy protocols later updated in the HITECH Act. When creating a HIPAA compliance strategy for your company, you must, therefore, know all the pertinent health insurance facts. Read on to learn about the top 5 components of the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rule.

As a medical or health care provider, one of the most important (and often worrisome) aspects to doing business is regulatory compliance to protect the civil rights of patients. Federal, state, and local agencies are constantly formulating and implementing new rules that not only affect the way you run your practice day to day but can result in severe financial consequences if you’re found to be in non-compliance. Here, well focus on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), one of the most important regulatory frameworks you’ll need to focus your compliance efforts on.

Theres arguably no type of information more sensitive than that which relates to personal health care or medical records. Whether its a hospital, clinic or personal physician, entities that provide vital healthcare services are often the targets of hackers, cyber criminals, and other malicious actors that might seek to gain access to private medical information. Which is exactly why the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA for short) was enacted in 1996, with stiff penalties and fines for HIPAA violations. If you are unsure whether your business is violating the HIPAA regulations, you’ll need to seek out cybersecurity consulting firms who are highly specialized in hipaa compliance solutions to foster covered entities.