HIPAA
Reach HIPAA compliance with
e-Backups can help medical services, practitioners and other organizations reach HIPAA compliance for secure off-site storage of electronic records.
HIPAA
background
As you know, in 1996, Congress
enacted the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA). The legislative
goals of HIPAA were to mandate the industry
to implement procedures to reduce the administrative
costs of healthcare, develop standard transactions
for consistency in the industry, promote security
and confidentiality of patient records and
to provide incentive for the healthcare industry
to use electronic communications to make patient
records available no matter where the patient
was being treated - a process that takes days
with manual records - and particularly useful
in emergencies. All health care providers,
insurance providers, health care clearinghouses
or health plans that electronically maintains
or transmits health information pertaining
to an individual must comply with HIPAA regulations.
One
of the HIPAA
mandates
requires
those in the healthcare industry to have an
off-site backup of critical data and a contingency
plan to access this data.
HIPAA
Contingency Planning
By working with e-Backups a medical practice,
provider or medical information chain participant
has a chance to become in compliance with
HIPAA. Our service supports specific areas
of compliance including:
- Off-site Data Backup
- Contingency Planning
- Disaster Recovery
- Emergency Operations
- Privacy
The functionality of e-Backups combined with the proper implementation of policies and procedures can provide the core data backup and contingency planning requirement with the ease that few other solutions can deliver. With the deadline approaching look to e-Backups to provide this critical piece.
Every practitioner, be they doctor, clinic, hospital, testing lab, surgery center, or any of the other organizations that provides services to individuals and stores patient medical records, must backup to a secure, encrypted off-site location by mid 2005.
IMPORTANT: No software product or solution will make your organization HIPAA compliant! Compliance is primarily a matter of office policies and procedures, most of which are not technology based. e-Backups and other companies can provide you with tools to assist you in achieving compliance, but it is up to you to configure and deliver those tools in a fashion appropriate to your organization's structure, size, and needs.