HIPAA Compliant IT Infrastructure Guide
Cloud & Managed Server Hosting for Healthcare Professionals
Important Healthcare Standards
Three critical standards or forms of compliance of concern to healthcare companies are HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) and SSAE 18 (Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 18), the update of SSAE 16.
Beyond finding hosting that is compliant with those standards, you also have to figure out the extent to which you want to include cloud in your architecture. How can you become compliant, and how should you approach decisions on cloud and server management?
GDPR Compliance for Global Managed Service Providers
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced on 25th May 2018. Its purpose is to enhance the data rights of individuals and enforce several obligations upon institutions that manage and process data. GDPR compliance has a wide-reaching scope which is likely to affect many businesses throughout the world.
ECC Memory vs. Non-ECC Memory – Why It’s Critical for Financial and Medical Businesses
By: Kris Fieler
As businesses depend more on big data, the need to prevent data loss has never been more important. One of the most vital areas for this loss prevention is where data is temporarily stored, RAM. ECC, or Error-Correcting Code, protects your system from potential crashes and inadvertent changes in data by automatically correcting data errors. This is achieved with the addition of a ninth computer chip on the RAM board, which acts as an error check and correction for the other eight chips. While marginally more expensive than non-ECC RAM, the added protection it provides is critical as applications become more dependent on large amounts of data.
Likelihood of a Memory Error
On any server with financial information or critical personal information, especially medical, any data loss or transcription error is unacceptable. Memory errors can cause security vulnerabilities, crashes, transcription errors, lost transactions, and corrupted or lost data.
Healthcare Hosting Checklist 2019: What is HIPAA Compliant Healthcare Hosting?
What should you look for in a good healthcare hosting provider? Healthcare hosting providers must comply with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which means they must protect and secure patient records. When you look at healthcare hosting providers, you want to know how HIPAA audit-ready the healthcare host is.
How To Choose A Domain Name That Builds Trust
Guest Author: Rodney Brazil
While businesses use many online channels to engage customers, the company website is the most important of all. It serves as the home base for all online resources created by a brand. While business directories, social media, and interactive maps get a lot of attention these days, these important traffic sources all lead back to one place: your website.
While there are many factors to consider when structuring and maintaining a business website, one decision must be made early: the domain name.
The Importance of Disaster Recovery In the Midst of a Natural Disaster
You may see natural disasters on TV or read about them but not completely understand the vulnerability associated with this issue. Actually, the risk is almost throughout the industry.
More than half of organizations (58%) are not ready for a major loss of data. Actually, the extent to which firms are unprepared is very worrisome: 60% will go bankrupt within 6 months, according to data from Washington, DC-based research firm Clutch. Also according to the statistics compiled by Clutch, cloud backup is on the rise, with:
- 84% of the organizations that have already adopted cloud backup having implemented both on-premises and cloud backups;
- 68% of cloud backup business customers testing their backups at least once per month; and
- 78% of small businesses planning to use cloud-hosted backup by 2020.
To set aside the specific technology of cloud backup, the need for disaster recovery is clear from the data on the business impact of large data losses. Since it is possible to have a disaster completely take you by surprise, and to in turn lose thousands or millions operationally and economically, it is a basic business need to have a disaster recovery plan implemented.
How to Become HIPAA-Compliant: Our 10-Step Guide
One of the problems with our increasingly technological world is that the speed at which our devices and services upgrade and make older versions obsolete can be dizzying. It feels like only an instant before the latest smartphone or flatscreen TV is being replaced with the bigger, better, faster model.
The same holds true in the world of hosting, data information, and server management. And while it can be tough to keep up for any type of business, it’s crucially important if your company is involved with health care IT and has to maintain HIPAA Compliance.
HIPAA Compliance Guide – How to Comply with HIPAA
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 or HIPAA compliant hosting in this article, which serves as a beginner’s HIPAA Compliance Guide.
Why HIPAA?
The healthcare privacy and security law was written to encompass the broad array of organizations for which it was intended. For that reason, the HHS website notes that “there is no single standardized program that could appropriately train employees of all entities.”[i]
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.
