Author: Kent Roberts

Many organizations are unsure if they need to follow the rules in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). You need a compliant site if you are handling electronic protected health information (ePHI), which is personally identifiable data collected during the course of the provision of healthcare.

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While HIPAA law is broad, at its core is the Security Rule, the full name for which is the Security Standards for the Protection of Electronic Protected Health Information. The Security Rule applies the rights that are conveyed by the Privacy Rule – i.e., the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information – within digital environments. In order to achieve this aim, the Security Rule requires administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. These three categories of defenses are critical to ensuring HIPAA-compliant file transfer. Specific elements of these types of Security Rule protections include these ten key healthcare file transfer considerations:

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Encryption is fundamentally important to meeting the guidelines of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Encryption is critical to meeting HIPAA compliance because encryption cloaks your most sensitive data from unauthorized viewing. This digital process uses standardized protocols to scramble all the data that is transmitted by a user into a code that makes it undecipherable. In other words, encrypted information is unreadable to any computer peering (accessing it) between the source and destination. Only the person sending the message and the one receiving it can see what is being communicated. In order to decrypt the information back into readable information, digital tools called keys are needed. Keys let the sender and receiver see the data and, afterwards, encrypt it again so that no one else can see it.

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Every organization that handles the electronic protected health information (ePHI) of US citizens must be concerned with federal healthcare compliance: that is, abiding by the parameters established in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (HITECH). A central element of HIPAA federal law is the Security Rule, which mandates implementation of appropriate cybersecurity measures to protect digital health records.

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Secure file transfer protocol (SFTP), a component of the secure shell (SSH) protocol, is useful in maintaining compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). SFTP uses encryption and algorithmic hash functions to protect information from unintended viewing or theft, and is considered a best-practice way to securely send files.

Like other standard protocols and technologies that are deployed to maintain HIPAA-compliant security, SFTP is not required specifically by the agency that regulates it, the Department of Health and Human Services. (The HHS regulates the law flexibly, allowing organizations to make their own specific decisions on means.) While you certainly do not have to use SFTP in order to stay compliant, it is a standard and straightforward way to meet the need for secure HIPAA file transfer.

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Global membership associations must find ways to strategically operate their infrastructure and provide services. Often, such strategic operation involves managed hosting. Managed hosting can be understood in contrast to unmanaged hosting. It can also be understood as one of the various services provided through a host’s role as a managed services provider (MSP). By looking at other core services provided by MSPs, we also get a sense of the services that are often included in managed hosting environments.

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If you’ve been charged with implementing a HIPAA-compliant database and it’s your first time building a system that adheres to the healthcare law, you may feel overwhelmed and confused about where to start. The first step is to focus your efforts so you can move forward systematically in creating one. The below considerations will allow you to establish a database and protect it over time.

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