HIPAA FAQs – All About Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996

Marketing Team Cloud Security Expert - CloudCodes Software
  • July 30th, 2021

Medical agencies dealing with patient records need to know what HIPAA is, as this is mandatory regulatory compliance. CASB solutions help in achieving HIPAA compliance.

What Is HIPAA?

Medical agencies that continuously deal with patient medical records must need to know what HIPAA is and that it is regulatory compliance mandatory for all medical offices. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), which is the United States legislation providing data privacy and security provisions to safeguard sensitive medical information, including patient medical records and other such identifiable medical and healthcare information. It outlines the rules and regulations to securely carry out day-to-day transactions to ensure that the confidentiality of patients is not breached at any given point of time. 

The chief goal of this law is to make it simpler for users to keep health insurance, safeguard patient confidentiality and protect the data security of critical healthcare information, and also to help healthcare firms to control their administrative costs. With cloud computing fused into medical offices all across the globe, this challenge of securing critical medical data has become all the more complex. With the inception of data storage over cloud data centers located far away owing to the scalability of massive amounts of medical records, there is a growing need for cloud security, and Cloud Access Security Brokers solutions help in achieving this.

What Is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Law?

HIPAA law standardizes electronic data exchange, data privacy, and security of healthcare information and medical records. This law advocates for secured transmissions of confidential medical data in medical work environments, for which, use of the secure server is needed, and the use of removable storage media is discouraged. CASB solutions can significantly help in achieving this.

What Is the Significance of HIPAA Compliance over Cloud Medical Models?

HIPAA is a governing law that defines and standardizes the procedural and structural layouts to ensure the safety, confidentiality, and privacy of healthcare records that are stored in multiple data centers over the cloud. Many times, these data centers are located at far off places, and thus, the need for HIPAA compliance. It becomes all the more critical for the medical offices to ensure against any leakages due to the magnitude of confidential data stored over the cloud. It entails the need for a HIPAA compliant custom-designed CASB solution to protect cloud data at all times.

What is the Need for Patient Data security?

Patient data security is mandatory for any healthcare system. Access Control mechanisms must be designed to protect the privacy and confidentiality of patient data, and data breach of confidentiality and privacy contracts. Using a CASB solution for a Cloud-based process that can help achieve compliance with HIPAA is always advocated with robust Cloud Access Control systems to restrict unauthenticated access round-the-clock.

Who Is Covered by HIPAA?

As per HIPAA, if any medical office belongs to the category of ‘business associates,’ or maybe ‘covered entities,’ and they are handling ‘PHI or protected health information’ in some way or the other. Those businesses require to be compliant with HIPAA. “Covered entities” usually describes the US healthcare clearinghouses, healthcare providers as well as health plans, who are engaged in the electronic transmissions of any healthcare data and medical information in connection with such transactions. 

CloudCodes in Healthcare Industry

CloudCodes deploys a customized CASB solution for healthcare where Device Restriction policy was implemented in the Access Control solution. It is done by binding MAC addresses of users with specific devices. This helps the firm in getting real-time data protection from previously-problematic unmanaged devices. Device restriction features helps in managing their company’s devices rendering much more security for browser, hardware, and even while sharing of data. With CloudCodes CASB solution as their data security arm, a company can secure its  sensitive health-related data on unmanaged devices.

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