HIPAA COMPLIANCE SOLUTIONS FOR MEDICAL AND DENTAL PRACTICES
STANDALONE HIPAA COMPLIANCE PROGRAM
Meets core annual requirements with a security risk assessment, HIPAA privacy & security training, and HIPAA policies and procedures.
CONTINUOUS SECURITY & HIPAA TRAINING PROGRAM
Combines HIPAA compliance and cybersecurity program to mitigate human risks, identify vulnerabilities, and meet compliance requirements.
COMPREHENSIVE COMPLIANCE PROGRAM
User vulnerability assessment, continuously analyzes key security metrics to identify human security risks and highlight the need for compliance.
ITGLOBAL facilitate a comprehensive HIPAA and cybersecurity program that help your practice on the following areas
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Training on the HIPAA security and privacy rules to meet compliance requirements.
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Policies and procedures
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Enterprise level security risk assessments
What's necessary for healthcare providers to comply with the law?
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF HIPAA?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted to protect patient information. HIPAA includes rules on privacy, security, and breach notification with regard to protecting consumer healthcare information.
WHO ENFORCES HIPAA?
HIPAA is regulated and enforced by the Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Recent changes to HIPAA legislation have provided additional guidance and authority for the OCR to enforce HIPAA compliance through audits and financial penalties.
WHY THE INCREASED ENFORCEMENT?
Over 147 million breached patient records have been reported to the HHS since 2009. These breached records have negatively impacted covered entities and business associates, resulting in over $41 million in resolution agreements and fines.
HOW DO I BECOME HIPAA COMPLIANT?
The following are the 3 core annual requirements required by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for every practice to be in compliance
- HIPAA privacy and security training for all employees
- HIPAA Policy and Procedures
- Security Risk Assessment
HIPAA requires that all employees have taken the training, sign-off of the policies and perform the annual risk assessment in order be in compliance and to limit the risk, all training need to be documented, log should list all employees and clearly show the date(s) training was provided, the type of course completed, and the content of the training sessions. This log should be kept with your HIPAA documentation along with a copy of any training material.
Companies that fail to train their employees on HIPAA and security best practices are subject to large fines
Becoming HIPAA compliant requires that your organization address all standards identified in the HIPAA rules, however, a good HIPAA compliance program includes more than just policies and procedures addressing HIPAA standards.
The following are some of the items that an effective compliance program will address.
- Conduct an acceptable risk analysis and Internal audits to assess the status of your compliance compared against the regulation
- Remediation plans to fix any gaps in your compliance that your audits may have uncovered
- Policies and procedures to document how your organization will address the HIPAA standards
- Annual employee training and attestation
- Documentation of your compliance program retained for 6 years
- Appointing a compliance officer, a privacy officer, and security officer
- Vendor management and business associate agreements
- Incident management to track and report an incident, should a breach occur
WHAT ARE THE HIPAA TRAINING REQUIREMENTS AND HOW OFTEN DOES IT NEED TO BE COMPLETED?
Under HIPAA, all employees must be trained annually and should be built into your on-boarding process rather than having one-off training sessions, this is to ensure that no employee is handling PHI without being properly trained on their HIPAA responsibilities first.
WHAT IS A HIPAA RISK ASSESSMENT?
A HIPAA risk assessment is a requirement identified in the regulation, which allows your organization to identify potential areas of risk. These risks can manifest in physical, technical, or administrative safeguards that must be addressed to help mitigate security issues. A properly run HIPAA risk assessment is required of all entities and must be run at least every 12 months.
I ALREADY ADDRESS MY CYBERSECURITY, DOES THAT MAKE MY PRACTICE HIPAA COMPLIANT?
No! Even though compliance and cybersecurity go hand-in-hand to protect your business, healthcare professionals have very different requirements when it comes to each.
Security is about mitigating the risk of a data breach–caused by a malware incident, ransomware incident, or simple employee error. Compliance, however, is about meeting the requirements laid out by HIPAA. You need both to protect your business and have peace of mind.
In most cases the local IT are not even aware that your practice are in breach of HIPAA guidelines and you need an independent and specialized company to handle your cybersecurity and HIPAA compliance programs.
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