HIPAA Compliance: Healthcare in an IT Environment
The globalized corporate world today is made up of a multinational multicultural workforce. Being
aggressively techno savvy makes management of this workforce easy for the global organizations.
However, along with such a vast organizational set up and large amounts of electronic data being
interchanged through wide corporate networks or the Internet comes in the requirement of security and
confidentiality of data.
Every organization, be it a corporate leader, or a small or medium sized business enterprise, is required to
conform to certain stated regulatory or standard requirements. This compliance is achieved through
various management processes such as strategies, contracts, procedures, and policies. Compliance
management in today’s business scenario has grouped Governance, risk, and Compliance management
under one umbrella, the GRC. This software with an integrated approach continuously monitors the
process across enterprises with the issues highlighted on dashboards for immediate attention and
correction.
HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of United States. Made up of two
sections, the first one deals exclusively with health insurance coverage, the second section is related to
health standardization of health related information systems and establishes mandatory regulations for IT
industries and health providers. Technological innovations have helped the software experts to develop
cloud based innovative and unified security monitoring and HIPAA compliance management software.
Such cost-effective compliance solution for the healthcare industry acts as a self-assessment tool for the
healthcare providers and their Business Associates in ensuring compliance to latest HIPAA healthcare
regulations.
The Healthcare Industry being more and more reliant on information technology and with the adoption of
electronic medical records, it is crucial to ensure the safe handling of sensitive data. HIPAA along with
HITECH ensures that organizations and medical practioners and business associates comply with stricter
notification standards, tight enforcements, penalties and liabilities for non-compliance, breach or data
leaks. With detailed risk analysis and complete security on relevant aspects of medical practices, this
cloud delivered software solution tracks and manages even the compliance documentation of the business
associates. Further, with all data being stored in secure data centers, it ensures that no patient data is
leaked from client sites.
Complying with each of the regulations separately may be a complex and time consuming process for even
the small medical practioners. Hence, the governance, risk and compliance (GRC), under one banner
offers, a streamlined, menu-driven, framework-based process, supporting HIPAA compliance,
harmonized with multiple regulations–and their constant automatic updates for changes in regulatory
requirements. Further being a cloud based turnkey service requires no additional IT infrastructure.
Also read on - Compliance management software, Audit log