Economy-class hosting vs. first-class HIPAA hosting

A hard fact of the Internet is that you need machines to be part of it – either on your own or as a service. If you are in the healthcare field and don’t want to set up servers for your website or other services in your own datacenter, you need HIPAA hosting.

All hosting is not created equal. Because there is a disparity of security and other checks and balances from one system to another, standards were created to guide oversight of infrastructure and maintain proper protection of patient data. Those standards were developed by the US Health and Human Services Department (HHS), as directed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Hence, beyond simple web hosting, anyone who is aiming to secure healthcare records needs HIPAA compliant hosting, sometimes called simply HIPAA hosting.

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Overwhelmed with HIPAA compliance? You’re not alone. Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is important to the covered entities and business associates that are expected by the federal government to follow the law.

However, the requirements of HIPAA and its regulatory agency, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), are not as rigid as they first may seem. We’ve detailed the broad concepts required to understand HIPAA in this article, which serves as a beginner’s HIPAA Compliance Guide.

Nonetheless, training is a requirement of HIPAA, so it’s necessary to find a strong beginner’s guide that can be used to train your employees on the essentials of compliance. Most of what is available online through the federal government is either aggregations of disparate pieces of information or sizable PDFs, such as the Guide to Privacy and Security of Electronic Health Information[ii] – created by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). The former is a bit disorganized. While the latter can be great as course material, its 60+ pages are overkill for the purpose of an initial overview.

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HIPAA Compliant Cloud Hosting

The number of organizations adopting virtualized environments continues to grow in many industries, including health care[I]. Virtualization enables network flexibility that most healthcare organizations could benefit from, but many are held back by a lack of clarity about what virtualization is, and how it relates to compliance.

A virtual environment is one in which a software layer, called a “hypervisor,” has been added to a physical server.  An operating system can then be loaded onto the hypervisor layer to create a “virtual machine” (VM), which is a software-defined server, and as such can do some things not possible with physical, hardware-dependent servers.  The hypervisor layer can determine the precise size and location of the server VMs or “instances” loaded onto it since it provides separation from the physical limitations of each piece of hardware.  As we will explore below, this can benefit organizations through increased agility and automation.

HIPAA compliance can be particularly scary for organizations, due to the implications of a breach of security inherent in health care, the complexity of the regulations, and the severity of potential fines.  Timely access to medical information can be a matter of life and death, but ensuring that information is accessible, portable, and renewable only covers Title I of the Act.  Title II, covering health care fraud and abuse, along with the enforcement-strengthening HITECH Act[II], imposes security and privacy rules on health care providers and the companies that support them. Compliance failures can result in fines of up to $1.5 million[III], and data breaches, which are increasingly common in healthcare[IV], can be even more expensive, particularly when reputational harm is considered.

Fortunately, virtualized environments can not only be HIPAA-Compliant quickly but can make compliance easier.

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