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What Is HIPAA Compliance – All About Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act

  author
Written By Ashwani Tiwari
Mack John
Approved By Mack John  
Published On February 26th, 2018
Reading Time 4 Minutes Reading

HIPAA Compliance is a necessary regulatory complaint for medical institutions dealing with patient records and CASB solutions help them achieve it.

What Is HIPAA Compliance?

All medical offices, who deal with patient medical records, need to know that HIPAA is mandatory for them to comply with. HIPAA, which stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, basically deals with the legislation of data privacy and security to safeguard medical information of the patients that may include their medical records and other healthcare information. The HIPAA rule outlines rules and regulations that are concerned with the day-to-day transactions of patient medical records by various and sundry medical agencies and healthcare centers so that confidentiality of patients’ data is not compromised at any given point of time. The main aim of HIPAA is to ascertain the following aspects:

  • Maintain patient data confidentiality
  • Protect security of healthcare data and patient information
  • Keep health insurance simple for users
  • Help control the administrative costs incurred by the healthcare institutions

With all the medical agencies migrating their data and records to cloud services, the challenge of securing medical records has become all the more multifarious. It is given that these data centers may be located far away, owing to scalability of massive volumes of records; and hence, there is a growing necessity of cloud security solutions to secure this data on cloud.

What Is the Need of HIPAA?

The HIPAA law aims at standardizing electronic data exchange; and hence, secures privacy of data and security of medical records as well as other healthcare information. Secured transmissions of critical data can be managed by the use of secure servers, and the use of removable media is discouraged; thus bringing about the much-needed safety in almost all medical work environments. CASB solutions help these medical institutions to achieve HIPAA compliance.

What is the Importance of HIPAA Compliance?

HIPAA helps medical agencies to standardize their procedures and structural layouts, so that safety and privacy of confidential medical records, which are stored in multiple cloud centers, is achieved thoroughly. HIPAA compliance becomes all the more necessary since the critical medical records are not stored on-premises, but somewhere in faraway places on cloud servers, and medical offices need to ensure that there is security of their confidential data that is stored in the cloud. The best solution comes from a customized CASB solution package that is designed as per the needs of that particular medical agency so that the data in the cloud can be protected at all times.

How is HIPAA Compliance Important for Patient Data Security?

Patient data security is a must as per the HIPAA law and Access Control mechanisms are designed to ensure that data doesn’t get misused by wrong hands. A strong Cloud Access Control system in CASB solution helps cloud-based processes to achieve compliance and restrict unauthenticated access to the sensitive data. CASB solutions should be so customized that they can ensure absolute safety and protection of all the healthcare information and medical records.

Which Type of Enterprises Need to Comply with HIPAA?

As per HIPAA, any medical offices that are handling Protected-Health-Information (PHI) along with its business associates and covered entities need to be HIPAA compliant. Any healthcare clearinghouses, which are concerned with the electronic transmissions of medical information and records or are connected with such transactions, come under the definition of covered entities. CASB solutions help medical enterprises, its covered entities and its associates help achieve HIPAA compliance.

How Can a CASB Help Enterprises with HIPAA Compliance?

Which are the enterprises that need to be HIPAA Compliance? As mentioned earlier, all the medical agencies, its associates, covered entities who deal with any type of medical transactions and healthcare information of the patients need to be HIPAA Compliance. Even the healthcare clearinghouses that deal with the electronic transmission transactions of the medical data come under its ambit. CloudCodes CASB Solutions help all these firms achieve HIPAA compliance and bring security and safety to the medical records. Once the healthcare firms and medical offices deploy any efficient CASB solution, they can rest assured that their sensitive medical records are safe and secure in the cloud and that they have achieved HIPAA compliance.