What Is HIPAA Compliance?
The significance of HIPAA Compliance has to be precisely understood by the medical agencies that deal with the medical records of patients. All medical offices must comply with the security standards of HIPAA. What is HIPAA? HIPAA refers to the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1999. This United States legislation provides for data privacy and includes security provisions to safeguard sensitive information. The patient medical records and other healthcare information all come under the ambit of this act and all the healthcare centers and medical offices dealing with it have to necessarily comply with HIPAA. All the routine activities that will be carried out at such institutions that deal with records have to follow certain guidelines and regulations as put forward by this Act. This is to ensure that the confidentiality of patients is not breached at any time which otherwise may lead to a financial and emotional loss for the patients. The chief aim of this law is that the medical offices safeguard their patient confidentiality and ensure data security of healthcare information. This also helps in effectively controlling the administrative costs for the healthcare firms. For the users, it helps to keep their health insurance simple and secure.
Cloud Computing And HIPAA
Of late, this mammoth task of complying with HIPAA security protocol has become difficult due to the penetration of cloud services into medical offices all across the world. The data centers for this cloud data storage are located far away and also since the volume of medical records has increased drastically, medical organizations desperately feel the need for cloud security. When this is an issue, the solution lies in the effective implementation of cloud security and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions do just that. What HIPAA law does is that it standardizes electronic data exchange thus justifying data security of healthcare information and medical records. It emphasizes the secured mode of transmission of confidential data in medical work environments. All this advocates the proper use of secure servers and the removal of storage media is strongly discouraged. These cloud security protocols required to bring about the security of sensitive patient data are greatly achieved by CASB solutions.
Significance of HIPAA Compliance
The primary goal of HIPAA is to ensure that the medical records of the patient in the healthcare centers remain safe and this is achieved through a series of security measures that standardizes the procedural and structural layouts. By this, the medical data stored in the cloud over multiple data centers remains safe. Also, since these data centers are often located in far-off places, the need for HIPAA compliance becomes very necessary thus insuring against the risk of sensitive medical records getting leaked intentionally or unintentionally. All these can be achieved by proper identification and segregation of sensitive data and tailor-made CASB solution to achieve HIPAA compliance for the cloud-saved medical data.
Why Do Healthcare Firms Needs to Comply with HIPAA?
For any healthcare system, patient data security is a must. Access Control mechanisms so designed to ensure the safety and protection of healthcare information from getting breached helps in protecting the privacy and confidentiality of patient data. It has to be ensured that the crucial information doesn’t get into the wrong hands which can further translate into confidentiality breaches and misuse of private contracts. HIPAA compliance for cloud-based processes can be achieved through CASB solutions with strong Cloud Access Control systems, thus restricting unauthenticated access.
CloudCodes Help Medical Firms Comply with HIPAA Compliance
Who all need to follow HIPAA compliance? All the business associates, covered entities handling protected health information need to be HIPAA compliant. The healthcare clearinghouses, healthcare providers as well as health plans that are into the electronic transmission transactions of the healthcare data come under the covered entities and need to adopt this standard. CloudCodes CASB solutions bring about absolute security. The required security protocols needed to comply with HIPAA can be implemented once the healthcare firms and medical offices deploy CloudCodes CASB solutions. Thus, CloudCodes CASB solutions help these medical firms achieve the much-required HIPAA compliance.