HITRUST Certification blog post
Is Your Healthcare Organization Looking for Better HIPAA Guidance?
As more healthcare information is stored and transmitted digitally, ensuring that your organization complies with the myriad of federal and state regulations is becoming increasingly difficult. As part of this digital transformation, healthcare organizations are partnering with cloud companies, data processors, and other organizations that must also comply with HIPAA business associate requirements. This has resulted in an increase in the scope of security challenges for healthcare providers and their business associates.
With OCR increasing its focus on auditing business partners as well, this adds another layer of complexity to ensuring your
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the user downloads unsafe software or uninstalls AV). It then provides automatic containment of potential threats. Network Sentry profiles each device and keeps a detailed log of every action taken, then delivers both the threat alert as well as the contextual information to the security analysts to expedite review. Network Sentry’s detailed log also offers comprehensive reporting that can be crucial for HIPAA audits.
HITRUST Certification
Your healthcare organization can incorporate the CSF frameworks into your business practices, or take it a step further, and become HITRUST CSF Certified. The consolidated controls view of the HITRUST CSF provides visibility into the controls for several regulatory requirements and the HITRUST audit can also help you solve any potential issues prior to an official audit, avoiding costly HIPAA fines.
Network Sentry has a strong history of providing companies with the visibility, control and remediation necessary to successfully implement the HITRUST CSF 01 and meet HIPAA requirements for access control. For more information on how Network Sentry can help your healthcare organization read our whitepaper, the Top 4 Network Security Challenges for Healthcare, or contact us at info@bradfordnetworks.com.
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Compliance 360 also assists in HITECH compliance by providing automated assessments and responses to electronic health information (SAI Global, 2018). This program appears to provide sufficient safeguards for HIPAA and HITECH compliance; it strives to create alerts and audits without becoming overly intrusive in hospital actions. Compliance 360 merely acts as an additional unbiased oversight system, when dealing with patient information.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed by congress in 1996, and helps to ensure the privacy and security of Electronic Health Records (EHR's). By following the rules and regulations set forth under HIPAA, we can ensure the safety of patients' EHR's. We are responsible for protecting patients' records, and there are many measures we can take in order do this. Firstly, we must always keep patients' health information private. This means no discussing the records with people that are not authorized to know, and even then, we should only disclose the minimum necessary amount of information possible. For covered entities, we must designate a privacy and security officer to ensure the privacy
Lately I have been hearing a lot about security of patient’s health records and how people are losing their jobs behind accessing information that they have no need to be in. It got me to wondering just how secure our personal information is from prying eyes and how who is alerted when these prying eye are in information that doesn’t concern them. So, when I ran across this article “Security Audits of Electronic Health Information” and “HIPAA Security Rule Overview” it caught my eye and curiosity on how they might work hand in hand when it comes to protecting what information is accessed by personnel. So, I choose these articles to get more information on this topic.
Discuss security standards and methods, including the need for data storage integrity and data backup and recovery. In addition to complying with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), SMC needs to be valiant in how the organization will protect information and manage network security. Information security is the protection of information against risk to its integrity, inadvertent disclosure, or availability (Hawkins, 2013a). The most common threats an organization's network will face are hackers, spyware, viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and malicious insider (Hawkins, 2013a). To protect SMC from hackers, they will use firewalls and intrusion-detection devices. Firewalls protect network systems by obstructing unauthorized entry while allowing approved communications (Hawkins, 2013a). Intrusion-detection systems monitor who the user is and what the user accesses. To promote HIPPA, SMC will track the last names of users who accessed patients with the same last name to reveal inappropriate use of client information.
(Dietrich, 2015), discussed that new regulations have caused many Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) to become subject to patient health care data security rules under HIPAA. When providing consulting services to a healthcare organization or assisting with revenue cycle, CPAs should try to limit their liability by minimizing exposure to health care data and establish an engagement letter to ensure the healthcare organization is liable if patient health care data is unnecessarily provided to the CPA. Under HIPAA, electronic information must be protected during electronic exchange, technically protected against unauthorized access, and physically protected against unauthorized access
Physical safeguards is the implementation of policies and procedures to limit physical access to its electronic information systems and the facility or facilities in which they are housed, while ensuring that properly authorized access is allowed which Disposal and Media Re-Use, areas mandatory to be addressed. Technical safeguards includes the implementation of policies and procedures for electronic information systems that maintain electronic protected health information to allow access only to those persons or software programs that have been granted access rights. Requirements include: Unique user identification, Emergency Access Procedures amongst other recommended areas for compliance. I would seek and review these policies to ensure the organization is being compliant. Noncompliance in this area could be detrimental for both the organization and for the patients serviced. If PHI is breached at the organization and there is no established procedure that would ensure corrective action immediately, HHS could impose hefty fines, patients may be notified and could file complaints as well.
Modern communications capabilities open up a world of possibilities for all types of medical practices to develop deeper connections with their patients and to manage health care remotely. The HIPAA Privacy Rule gives patients the right to obtain copies of their medical records, treatments and protected health information or PHI. These requirements go further if medical providers want to receive reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid -- patients must be able to access their records online, download copies and transmit the information to third-party providers. Most medical practices are finding it necessary to develop patient portals where patients and physicians can interact, share information and perform important functions such as practices billing patients and accepting payments online. HIPAA 's rules require that these patient portals have strong security and privacy protections to prevent unauthorized access of these confidential PHI records.
HIPAA Security & Privacy Rule instructs entities who have administrative control over patient’s personal information implement technical and non-technical strategies to mitigate or eliminate vulnerabilities. Statue permits hospital and other entities to use any security measures that is judicious, pertinent, and effectively deployed ("HHS.gov," 2015).
What administrative safeguards are in place? (Administrative safeguards refer to the policies and procedures that exist in your practice to protect the security, privacy, and confidentiality of you patients’ PHI.) CLC converted into Electronic Health Record. The system they use is called Thereap. Therep allows staff to view individual’s medical records and make changes to their chart as need and keep track of their health records. Its secure and maintains a directory which contains identifiers required for Licensed Clinicians. All employees have to go through annual training on HIPPA Violations, Rights and Due Process, Corporate Compliance and Ethics, False Claims Recovery Act every year to stay in compliance. Each employee had to sign
An advancement towards adopting a system that allows all aspects of information security to be protected is highly encouraged. The implementation of this new system will ensure all information and data, while it’s in storage, will be protected and kept confidential. This will help also improve the accessibility of the structure on which the information security management system is built on. EHR cybersecurity should develop different strategic and process methods for technology to mitigate cyber threats. HCO’s should only implement a security program that’s simple and easy for users to practice yet is an effective system. This will significantly ensure the ability to monitor and detect threats in real time. Within the components of this new cyber security system, healthcare organizations should address complex security problems by identifying and simplifying, the right tools, laws, policies. Hence, the management of healthcare is at greater risk than ever before since hackers and there are overwhelming costs associated data breaches. In the end, cyber security threats will always be present, but what’s important is to limit the threats to a minimum by advancing the implementation of IT
In the last few decades there has been an undeniable surge in the mere volume of the storage and transmission of what is known as “e-PHI,” or, electronic patient health information, and with it came an inevitable increase in data breaches. In the United States, any person or organization that interacts with this sort of data needs to do so in a way that is compliant with a set of guidelines called HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). These guidelines are essentially a set of physical, technical, and administrative controls on sensitive patient data such as health records. The biggest failing of HIPAA is that it’s static. While HIPAA itself is an
The rising costs of healthcare have increased the need for centralized and secure data for organizations to proactively control costs and to continue to improve the quality of care for patients. Many healthcare organizations have been working towards tackling and complying with this issue but have a variety of complex situations due to limited resources (both technology and financial), geographic limitations, and even political issues from organizational setups. Healthcare has become a competitive market as well which makes the limitations become more prevalent to those who can’t keep up.
The department of Health and Human Services protects and guides the health and well being of individuals here in America (Thacker, 2014). They fulfill these duties providing Americans with adequate and efficient health and human services and monitoring services designed to increase the efficiency of care in the health system (Thacker, 2014). One of the services being monitored by the department of Health and Human Services is the electronic health record system, which carries private and vital information of patient’s health record enabling all eligible participating health workers access to these records (Thacker, 2014). A breach of the protective health information of patients in a health organization creates chaos as these are against the health insurance portability and accountability (HIPAA) law (Thacker, 2014). Hence, measure will have to be put in place to determine what caused the breach and how to rectify it to ensure the breach never happens again (Thacker, 2014).
ABC Healthcare must be able to respond and recover from attacks, failures, and accident. Before a recovery plan can be put into place, first security mitigations must be in place to be able to detect attacks, failures, and accidents. ABC Healthcare must ensure that all software and applications receive the necessary updates and patches. Without this users’ accessibility to information could be affected as well as the confidentiality and integrity of any data on the network.
In today’s age of healthcare, health informatic innovations such as the health information exchange have allowed electronically available healthcare data, such as clinical, administrative, and financial information, to be shared within healthcare systems, hospital networks, and other healthcare settings. As organizations begin to share sensitive information across political, geographical, and institutional boundaries, there is a constant risk of patient data being compromised. Therefore, close attention must be given to confronting the specific problems resulting in an increase in healthcare data breaches, as well as determining the appropriate solutions in order for healthcare organizations to protect sensitive patient data.