What is HIPAA Compliance?

The benchmark for protecting sensitive patient data is set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

What is Hipaa?

To achieve HIPAA Compliance, organisations that deal with protected health information (PHI) must put in place and adhere to physical, network, and process security measures. HIPAA compliance is required of all covered entities (those who provide healthcare treatment, payment, and operations) and business associates (those who have access to patient information and assist with those activities). Subcontractors and any other associated business partners must likewise comply, as must other companies.

What is HIPAA Compliance?

In this article we will explain everything about HIPAA and HIPAA complaince requirements, so continue reading.

As technology affects every aspect of our lives, businesses in all industries have developed strategies to operate more quickly and effectively. The medical field is one that has grown rapidly as a result of contemporary innovations.

Details on Hipaa Compliance

Going paperless has enabled a variety of businesses, including pharmacies, hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices, to work more quickly. Healthcare providers are now able to visit more patients and keep easily accessible records thanks to the migration of payment systems, questionnaires, and a variety of other administrative and clinically oriented systems to electronic devices. Prior to the implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), there was no widely recognised set of privacy and security requirements to protect patient information. Today, we’ll go into great detail on the numerous requirements of HIPAA compliance and the businesses that are impacted by this rule.

What is required for HIPAA Compliance?

Self-Audits: In order to determine if their organisation complies with HIPAA Privacy and Security standards on an administrative, technical, and physical level, covered entities and business partners must undertake annual audits of their business. A Security Risk Assessment is merely one crucial audit that HIPAA-beholden companies are obliged to conduct in order to maintain their compliance year after year. This means that it is NOT ENOUGH to be compliant under HIPAA.

Plans for correcting compliance violations must be put in place once covered businesses and business partners have discovered their compliance gaps through these self-audits. Dates by which holes will be filled in are required to be included in these remediation plans, which must be thoroughly documented.

Documentation – HIPAA-responsible enterprises are required to keep track of EVERY step they take to comply with the law. To pass stringent HIPAA audits, this documentation is essential during a HIPAA investigation with HHS OCR.

Business Associate Management – To ensure PHI is handled securely and to reduce liability, covered organisations and business associates alike must document all vendors with whom they exchange PHI in any capacity and sign business associate agreements. To take into account changes in the nature of an organization’s connections with vendors, BAAs must be reviewed every year. Before ANY PHI can be disclosed, BAAs need to be carried out.