While HIPAA acquires all of the attention in the healthcare company, it is essential to know what is particularly assigned by HITECH – noting down that HITECH compliance demands to safeguard PHI (Protected Health Information) and digitizing & sharing it with doctors as well as patients too. Also, enterprises have to know the method HITECH changes and amplify the requirements of HIPAA. The method comes up with the file encryption technology and emails compliance approaches, which can identify both requirements’ sets. In today’s blog, we are going to learn about the HITECH compliance checklist & its additional measures to digitize medical information & use it to enhance healthcare quality.
What is HITECH Compliance?
The Healthcare Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act is a 2009 law that originated to motivate enterprises to promote the adoption and meaningful use of EHR (Electronic Health Records). HITECH enforces additional measures to digitize medical information and use it to enhance healthcare quality. Also, it tries to avoid penalties that occur due to the failure in collecting sufficient use of EHR.
The HITECH Act had strengthened fines and modified enforcement of HIPAA violations, developing four violations’ stages with high penalties – around $ 1.5 million fine maximum. Due to the presence of HIPAA HITECH compliance, the entities are subject to fines even if they did not know a violation has happened, although those violations are at the lowest level. Well, the HIPAA and HITECH compliance also gives a chance to companies to eliminate penalties, if violations are not avoided, and are corrected within 30 days.
Major Objectives of HITECH Compliance
The major purpose of the HITECH Act is to encourage the use of interoperable and secure EHR throughout the United States. To do that, it comprises three phases and they are mentioned below:
- The first phase varies somewhat based on enterprises or professionals; addressed healthcare executives must fulfill 15 major objectives, 5 out of 10 menu objectives, and six CQMs (Clinical Quality Measures). Hospitals have 15 CQMs, 5 menus, and 15 core. Vendors will be explained in meetings about the inapplicable measures like chiropractors do not have to access electronic prescribing because they aren’t responsible for writing prescriptions. The major aim of this stage is to enhance the medical quality by going through the drug interactions and auditing and charting important signs along with the meaningful use purposes like securing and deploying EHR.
- The second stage demands for service vendors to begin the use of EHRs in a sophisticated manner. For the HITECH compliance, vendors have to use computer resources or EHR due to the following reasons:
- Record around 30% of radiology and lab orders, and 60% of prescriptions
- Give complete support to at least 5 clinical decisions
- Provide care information when patients are transferred
- Allow patients to access their health records on the web
- Permit patients to communicate securely online
- Transmit around 50% of prescriptions
E-security is the initial objective of HITECH compliance stage 2. Security updates, encryption, and security risk analysis are all particularly made for protecting PHI.
- The third stage is still being ironed out. The entire application as a whole goes forward to evolve. What would not change, however, is essential for using EHR. This is required to enhance healthcare, and a sufficient amount of security to secure patient records.
Trending HITECH Compliance and Security
There are a lot of issues that a single technology can’t handle. For example – the encryption cannot protect your officials from setting a weak account password and saving their passwords on unsecured platforms. Medical enterprises have to integrate intelligent technology standards, sound auditing, and real-time monitoring and feedback system to maintain the culture of security. The best practices of HIPAA compliance – especially administrative and physical safeguards – draw how much there is to do apart from IT security. Physically, companies have to control access to their field where EHR or other PHI is saved. This scenario usually occurs in a small doctor’s office, which can be as easy as maintaining patients out of a few fields where PCs are used or earlier old files are stored. Whereas in a big hospital, access control might demand guards, security services, and keycards monitoring.
HITECH Act Compliance Demands for utility Anyone Can Use
Since the HITECH Act causes the reason to use EHR, more healthcare professionals and patients are using confidential data in the cloud. Unluckily, not all these individuals care about security or even know about this. More than ever, enterprises have security utilities that can be used by anyone.
CloudCodes provides a simple platform to manage and secure email services and deal with file encryption. Unlike portals, it does not demand a complicated installation and learning procedure, or new sign-in IDs to remember. The solution also provides security services for healthcare industries to protect emails and documents in a push manner. Since everyone in today’s date uses email for their purpose, they have to get higher adoption, the lower challenge of exposures, and better adherence to the standards of HITECH act compliance.