The primary focus of healthcare is taking care of people, but it goes beyond just saving lives. There is a vast and complex series of systems in place to safeguard patients and their private health information. One of those systems is HIPAA compliance, and in today’s digital world, maintaining compliance to that standard has grown more difficult over the years. This article discusses the importance of HIPAA procedures and explores Prestige Technology’s dedication to upholding it.
HIPAA, short for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act passed in 1996, is a set of legal requirements for how covered entities and their business associates handle protected health information (PHI). Covered entities include health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers that conduct certain transactions electronically. This can range from hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and health insurers, to IT and cloud providers that handle PHI on their behalf. Some employers and schools may also fall under HIPAA in specific circumstances (for example, sponsoring a group health plan or operating a clinic that bills electronically), but not all “businesses and schools” are automatically subject to HIPAA. HIPAA procedures were put into place to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of private patient information.
With the rise of electronic record keeping, digital data transfer, and cloud services used, electronic personal health information, or ePHI, became much more of a priority for institutions to track. There are three primary HIPAA rules that govern how ePHI is handled: the Privacy Rule, the Security Rule, and the Breach Notification Rule.
When it comes to Prestige Technology’s digital HIPAA safeguards, the Security Rule is of utmost importance to us. It defines administrative, physical, and technical safeguards for protecting ePHI—covering everything from how systems are configured to how access is controlled and monitored wherever ePHI is stored or transmitted.
How Prestige Counters the Most Common HIPAA Weak Points
This is where Prestige Technology’s approach to healthcare technology steps in. We build our services from the ground up with HIPAA compliance in mind. We cover several healthcare IT breach points in our services.
- Exterior Phishing: Most healthcare systems experience breaches through seemingly innocuous emails or correspondences. Phishing threats are looking for a way to get in by being let in. Prestige counters this through enterprise level email threat protection, intelligent spam filtering, and advanced anomaly detection that pinpoint threats before they’re allowed in.
- Unauthorized Access: Another way ePHI becomes compromised is through hardware being utilized by unauthorized personnel. Anytime a staff member doesn’t fully sign out of their devices after using them, or ipads and computers are stolen, there’s a chance that ePHI will get leaked. Our thorough measures for this are multi-factor authentication, full system logging, role-based access controls, and automated lockout systems that always keeps hardware secure. We communicate all these procedures through crystal clear BAAs and shared responsibility models.
- Encryption Failures: Firewalls and encryption are most healthcare institutions best defense against exterior attacks. However, there are always new ways of circumventing current security standards. Prestige ensures AES 256 at rest, TLS 1.2 or higher in transit, full disk encryption, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and off-site encrypted backups. Alongside post-quantum encryption as a part of our Secure+ HealthNet service, we ensure that any IT system can adapt to future exploitations as well.
Conclusion
HIPAA compliance is crucial for safeguarding patient information. Unfortunately, protecting ePHI is a hurdle that many institutions are unable to upkeep with their current systems. That’s why we build our systems with HIPAA compliance in mind from step one. We take a proactive approach to our cybersecurity, instead of a reactive one.