HIPAA Compliant Hosting

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 and be HIPAA compliant.

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; further below, you will find our HIPAA Compliance Checklist.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Preparedness of the healthcare industry to protect patient data

The newly connected nature of the healthcare industry means patient data can be accessed at any time and anywhere. However, this also means traditional defensive measures that have kept healthcare organizations and patient data protected from hackers until now, have weakened.

Read More

The healthcare industry has been a primary target of data hackers for several years. There are numerous reasons for this. First, the healthcare industry offers a lot of valuable information to successful hackers – social security numbers, names, addresses, Medicaid ID numbers, medical records, health insurance information, and more – can all be scraped from a successful breach. It’s a literal goldmine for hackers.

Read More

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.

Read More

Streamlining workflow and increasing productivity can be tricky for any business. For companies in heavily-regulated industries like healthcare, it can be downright daunting.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was enacted in 1996, requires all healthcare providers to meet strict data privacy and security requirements in order to safeguard protected health information (PHI).

Read More

In the Internet age, data is an increasingly valuable asset; data on all aspects of modern life is captured, stored and processed online. Data warehousing and machine learning techniques have enabled business organizations to use this data to learn customer habits and predict future growth. Due to surging recognition in the value of data, it is especially important for individuals, businesses and enterprises to push a security-first agenda, mitigate cybersecurity risks, and protect all business-critical or otherwise sensitive data.

Read More