Advantages of HIPAA Compliant Solutions

 The pressure on the healthcare industry across the world including US is on the rise as regards delivery of better quality of patient care and to bring about reduction in costs. Medical IT solutions like claims processing system, practice management software, EMR (electronic medical records), EHR (electronic health records), etc. are proving to be handy in achieving the above goal. The technology is helping to make life easier for doctors, hospitals as well as patients. However, the problem being there are a large no. of vendors offering a wide range of medical IT solutions. A particular system may be suitable for the practice and other may not. In absence of some sort of standardization and guidelines the optimal results can not be expected. Here, comes the role of HIPAA compliant solutions that are developed as per the HIPAA guidelines and set of rules.

HIPAA stands for “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act”, the act was enacted in 1996. Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. Title II of HIPAA, known as the Administrative Simplification (AS) provisions, requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers. Basically HIPAA is a regulatory body that provides guidelines as one of its functions as regards the development of healthcare IT systems ultimately known as HIPAA compliant solutions.

HIPAA compliant solutions provide a no. of safeguards as against a non-HIPAA compliant / un-standardized healthcare IT system:

1) Administrative Safeguards - policies and procedures designed to clearly show how the entity will comply with the act.

2) Physical Safeguards – controlling physical access to protect against inappropriate access to protected data.

3) Technical Safeguards – controlling access to computer systems and enabling covered entities to protect communications containing PHI transmitted electronically over open networks from being intercepted by anyone other than the intended recipient.

Information systems housing PHI must be protected from intrusion. When information flows over open networks, some form of encryption must be utilized. If closed systems/networks are utilized, existing access controls are considered sufficient and encryption is optional. And many other guidelines that ensure safety and security of data, standardization of system by introducing functional features and so on.

If we sum up, HIPAA compliant solutions ensure better safety and security of data, standardization, functional features and inclusion of other privacy policy / procedures that can be helpful in achieving the optimum utilization of the system.