HIPAAHITECH Acts, it has now become mandatory for them to protect Patient healthcare information and show to the authorities that they have implemented policies and practices that are in conformity with the control requirements of the Regulations. The Department of Health and Human Services of United States of America has enacted Compliance regulations for all medical practioners in the country. To ensure privacy and security of sensitive health information, medical records and confidential data of any individual through appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safety measures, the US government brought the HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act into effect in the year 1996. Further the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act came into force in early 2009, extending the privacy requirements enacted in HIPAA beyond the health care providers to the services and companies with which they do business, ensuring that in case of any violation of the HIPAA security regulations, the entities and their business associates covered under the act will face penalties for the same. The combination of HIPAA and HITECH compliance would definitely ensure that these records are encrypted and secure during any associated electronic transmission of health information.
Health care providers who need to comply with this healthcare regulation may be large health insurance companies, company health plans or small and medical enterprises and their business associates handling Medicare and Medicaid. All medical practioners, clinics, hospitals, psychologists, chiropractors, nursing homes, pharmacies and even dentists, who handle patient health information, are covered entities of this regulations and need to be compliant. Even the Healthcare clearinghouses processing data also need to meet healthcarecompliances.
Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), innovations from the technical world, have now made it possible to offer comprehensive and scalable compliance solutions from the cloud. Some of its clear advantages are the low cost in remaining compliant, easy updates of regulations and software code, multi-tenanted solution with different stakeholders having secure and exclusive access to their data, central repository of updated regulations citations, best practices accessible to the users while assessing their compliance status, advanced risk algorithms that help prioritizing the action plan for remediation, unification of controls from different regulations and standards, and many others. This has helped medical practioners concentrate on their patients and leave the compliance processes to the experts in the field. The development of unified security monitoring system and compliance management software work towards safeguarding the patient health records within the policy framework and guidelines.
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