The healthcare fraternity is faced with an increasing need for securing patient health care information with the adoption of information technology. They find themselves inadequately equipped in its security policies and practices to assure the authorities that the information is indeed safe in medical practice. The HITECH or Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act was enforced on Jan 6, 2009 as an additional regulation to the HIPAA or Health Insurance and Portability Act. However, most of the healthcare organizations have failed to be consistently compliant with the HITECH Act.
Deploying A good percentage of security breaches can be attributed to administrative loopholes. As per a survey conducted on 77 US healthcare organizations by the Ponemon Institute, 90% had suffered data breaches, 79% were found non-conforming to HIPAA individual audits, 50% did not have supportive HITECH management strategies, 60% had insufficient risk management policies and 50% of organizations had untrained staff, unaware of the security and privacy regulations.
Security compliance has become a perplexing issue with seemingly contradicting regulatory mandates. On the one hand, health care reform is demanding more access to personal health information online while HIPAA and HITECH are stressing on accountability and compact security solutions. With the ever-increasing demand on information security within the health record systems, the only way that healthcare providers can find confort is by investing in a web-based compliance management program with automated processes.
This cloud-based service provides the best compliance and monitoring solutions ensuring complete adherence to the HIPAA/ HITECH regulations. This system provides specific guidelines with high levels of visibility and progressive view of the compliance status. It is equipped with built-in extendable support for all HIPAA HITECH requirements that can be set to update the systems automatically according to any ongoing revisions on the acts. This web-based program eliminates all manual errors thereby providing accurate information and reduces wastage of time.
The healthcare industry has been inefficient in driving the compliance momentum successfully due to very hight technology costs, which the small medical establishments and providers find unaffordable. With the web-based services, these small establishments now can be free of any financial burden as there is no need for investing in any custom hardware but yet implement the best practices and policies as per the HIPAA compliance and HITECH Acts.
It can be unnerving and assiduous to keep up with the various healthcare compliance mandates. Non-conformance can evoke decimating consequences and penalties. This is an awakening call for all healthcare providers, big or small, to get their act straightened in keeping the electronic protected health information to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability and to remain safe from issues of non-conformance and non-compliance..
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