What Does a HIPAA Consulting Company Do?

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Keeping data safe is the highest priority of the IT industry. Now the healthcare industry stores and transmits data in electronic form. It is important to keep the patient’s medical information confidential and secure.

HIPAA - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act provides protection. This act gives a set of standards to keep the medical information safe and secure. It is applicable to any medical practice, health insurance plans, third-party clearing house and any other business that is involved in healthcare.

You can become a HIPAA compliant business. This will lead to the data being kept securely as per the standards. There are HIPAA consulting companies which offer HIPAA certification, assessments and audit services. When you become a HIPAA compliant business you can showcase yourself as committed to protecting the sensitive data.

Common practices followed in HIPAA certification

You should follow these practices once you are HIPAA compliant:

You should create policies on using and accessing workstations, electronic media and data access points.

There should be policies that restrict adding, deleting and transferring data in any form using an electronic media.

You should make sure that there are no data transferable devices on your premises.

You should have access control for the data that is stored in the physical network.

You should provide user ids, emergency access procedures, auto log off feature and data encryption.

You should keep track of all those to whom the access was granted and you should random checks of the details looked at.

You should do audits using hardware and software platforms.

Details of HIPAA

HIPAA has five titles and Title 2 is regarding the data security and the privacy of personally identifiable healthcare information (PHI). It has the following:

A privacy standard for a patient’s healthcare information and establishes a national standard for data protection.

A security standard for protecting the electronically protected healthcare information and establishes a security standard for protecting the data that is stored or transmitted in electronic form.

A breach rule that states that the HIPAA compliant entities will have to provide a notification if there is a breach of the unsecured protected health information.