HIPAA Compliance
What is HIPAA? HIPAA is an acronym for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It is imperative that practices are in compliant with handling private patient information. For smaller practices, this can be overwhelming dealing with legal system and costs in doing so.
Advanced IT is well-experienced in helping healthcare organizations with the security of their Electronic Patient Health Information (EPHI). Advanced IT has a systematic initial evaluation and recommends actions to work towards and maintain HIPAA compliance. Documentation of all the steps taken to ensure network is secure is provided to the company. Expert technicians will periodically provide consultation to organizations to guarantee the privacy of the patients, as well as network security.
Purpose:
HIPAA requires:
- Improved efficiency in healthcare delivery by standardizing electronic data interchange.
- Protection of confidentiality and security of health data through setting and enforcing standards.
More specifically, HIPAA called upon the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to publish rules that will ensure:
- Standardization of electronic patient health, administrative and financial data
- Unique health identifiers for individuals, employers, health plans and health care providers
- Security standards protecting the confidentiality and integrity of "individually identifiable health information," past, present or future.
The bottom line: sweeping changes in most healthcare transaction and administrative information systems.
Who is affected?
Virtually all healthcare organizations – including all healthcare providers, health plans, public health authorities, healthcare clearinghouses, and self-ensured employers – as well as life insurers, information systems vendors, various service organizations, and universities.
Are there penalties?
HIPAA calls for severe civil and criminal penalties for non-compliance, including:
- Fines up to $25K for multiple violations of the same standard in a calendar year
- Fines up to $250K and/or imprisonment up to 10 years for knowing misuse of individually identifiable health information
How are healthcare organizations affected?
Broadly and deeply. Required compliance responses aren't standard, because organizations aren't. For example, an organization with a computer network will be required to implement one or more security authentication access mechanisms – "user-based," "role-based," and/or "context-based" access – depending on its network environment.
Effective compliance requires organization-wide implementation.
Compliance requirements include:
- Building initial organizational awareness of HIPAA
- Comprehensive assessment of the organization's privacy practices, information security systems and procedures, and use of electronic transactions
- Developing an action plan for compliance with each rule
- Developing a technical and management infrastructure to implement the plans
- Implementing a comprehensive implementation action plan, including
- Developing new policies, processes, and procedures to ensure privacy, security and patients' rights
- Building business associate agreements with business partners to support HIPAA objectives
- Developing a secure technical and physical information infrastructure
- Updating information systems to safeguard protected health information (PHI) and enable use of standard claims and related transactions
- Training of all workforce members
- Developing and maintaining an internal privacy and security management and enforcement infrastructure, including providing a Privacy Officer and a Security Officer
Contact Advanced IT to get more information or to start on getting your business HIPAA Compliant. Email: info@advanced-it.net or 408-898-7876.