HIPAA Compliant EHR
Why Having HIPAA Compliant EHR Software Matters So Much More Than You Realize
Ensuring Security and Compliance with a HIPAA-Compliant EHR
According to one recent study, the average cost of a single consolidated cyberattack resulted in losses that hit an enormous $4.45 million in 2023. If you needed a single statistic to help highlight why it’s so important to take cybersecurity seriously, let it be that one.
But if yours is an organization operating in the healthcare field in particular, the situation is actually even worse than you might expect. Another study indicated that there were 725 reported data breaches over the course of the year. In that time, about 133 million records were compromised. Not only was this the most reported data breaches ever, but it was the highest number of breached records, too.
Common Causes of Healthcare Data Breaches
A data breach in the healthcare sector can happen for an unfortunately large list of reasons.
- Phishing/Malware Attack: Sometimes, a provider is the victim of a phishing or malware attack that steals their credentials without them realizing it.
- Insider Threat: Perhaps there was an insider who either intentionally or (more likely) accidentally disclosed patient information. Regardless, the impact can be catastrophic – and the financial burden alone is often too much for smaller organizations to handle.
But at the same time, none of this should dissuade you from embracing the innovation that only digitization brings with it – particularly when it comes to EHR solutions. You’d still be hard-pressed to find a better way to optimize workflows, reduce overhead, increase revenue, and improve the patient experience – all at once.
All this is to say that you can’t just choose any EHR to meet your needs. You need to select the right HIPAA-compliant enterprise EHR software built-in privacy and security features for a wide range of different reasons, all of which are worth a closer look.
What is HIPAA Compliance?
Breaking Things Down
Understanding the Importance of HIPAA-Compliant EHR
To get an understanding of why having a HIPAA-compliant EHR is so essential to your success, you must first understand exactly what HIPAA is to begin with.
Short for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA itself was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. It is designed to safeguard protected health information, otherwise known as PHI. This is the type of sensitive medical record or designated record data that can be used to:
- Identify an individual
- Is created during the course of healthcare
The classic example of all this would be if you were recently diagnosed with some type of disease that you didn’t want people knowing about. If records pertaining to your diagnosis or treatment plan were to fall into the wrong hands, people would know that you were battling a health condition and would know exactly what it was. HIPAA compliance is designed, in part, to help prevent something like that from happening.
To properly comply with HIPAA, any organization dealing with PHI needs to have physical, network, and process-based security measures in place. This means that any organization that provides treatment, payment services, or operations in the world of healthcare must take steps to become compliant. However, a private practice is far from the only entity that needs to concern themselves with this. Coverage requirements also extend to:
- Any business associate that has access to PHI at any time. An example of this might be an IT company doing work on the physical computers where electronic health records are being locally stored.
- Organizations that support the aforementioned treatment, payment, or operations services.
- Subcontractors. Examples of that would include people and places like emergency facilities, specialists, labs, medical imaging providers, and more.
When HIPAA was first published in 1996, it required the Department of Health and Human Services to put together a series of regulations that were designed to protect both the privacy and the security of health-related information for patients everywhere. Not long thereafter, the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule were published. The "Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information," also called simply the Privacy Rule for short, sets limits on how this type of sensitive health information can be created, how it can be used, and what disclosures can be made without requiring a person's authorization. Most notably, the Privacy Rule gave people more control over their protected health information than ever. Today, if you want to obtain a copy of all your health records, you can do so fairly easily. You have HIPAA and the Privacy Rule to thank for that. You can also direct a covered entity to send an electronic copy of your health records to any third party you might be working with, you can request corrections to the information contained in those records, and more.
With all that in mind, the HIPAA Security Rule essentially takes what is dictated by the Privacy Rule and puts it into practice. Here, we're more focused on the technical and non-technical protections that covered entities must have in place to keep electronic PHI in particular safe from prying eyes. It's one thing to say that it's important to keep records pertaining to someone's diagnosis (or any other treatment, for that matter) away from prying eyes. It's another thing to actually do something about it. That's why compliance with the Security Rule begins by requiring an organization to assess the security risks they face, all so they can put in place the administrative, physical, and technical safeguards required to mitigate that risk as much as possible.
- Examples of administrative safeguards would be those actions, policies, and procedures that a healthcare organization would follow to maintain compliance. Examples of this would include everything from making sure that only certain employees have access to an EHR system, to choosing an EHR solution like PrognoCIS that is HIPAA-compliant in the first place.
- Physical safeguards would be those that help protect both electronic PHI, along with the computers used to access that information, from unauthorized access. So if copies of all patient records are stored on-site on a server, for example, there must be physical safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized access to the room where that server equipment is housed in.
- Technical safeguards would be the types of technology that is used to protect and control access to electronic patient health information. A VPN that prevents unauthorized access to your private practice's network where electronic PHI is accessed would be just one example of such a technical safeguard.
How is HIPAA Applied to Electronic Health Records (EHR)?
The Evolution of EHR and HIPAA
- When HIPAA was first signed into law, electronic health record (EHR) platforms like the ones we have today didn’t exist yet.
- At the time, EHRs were essentially limited to digital versions of files and documents that previously only existed on paper.
- People weren’t yet thinking about platforms that could integrate medical billing, telemedicine, custom mobile apps, and more under one roof.
Understanding HIPAA’s Impact on EHR Security
- Because of this, questions like “what are the security standards for EHR?” or “how does HIPAA impact electronic health records?” are more complex than they seem.
HIPAA Compliance for Telemedicine
As per the Department of Health and Human Services, all covered healthcare providers and health plans must use technology from vendors that comply with HIPAA. If a private practice wants to offer telemedicine to patients:
- They must enter into a HIPAA business associate agreement.
- This agreement covers not just the video conferencing platform used for virtual appointments, but also any other remote communication technologies.
Using HIPAA-Compliant Platforms for Telehealth
- If your private practice wants to offer telehealth appointments, you cannot use traditional platforms like Zoom.
- If you use a HIPAA-compliant platform and follow up with a patient in writing, the platform used for that communication must also be compliant.
The Role of Encryption in Protecting Electronic Health Records
From a purely logistical point-of-view, HIPAA is actually very clear as to which measures need to be in place to remain compliant with regard to electronic health records. These include taking steps like:
Access Control
Techniques like passwords, PINs, and more should be used to make sure that only the people who are authorized to have access to patient electronic records have it.
Use of Encryption
When EHRs are transmitted or stored, they must be encrypted properly. This ensures that only authorized individuals with the correct decryption key can access the information.
Audit Trail
At any given moment, you should be able to see who has accessed a record, what changes were made, when that access occurred, and more.
Acknowledging the Reality of Data Breaches in Healthcare
Despite all these provisions, it’s also important to acknowledge that no system is perfect – meaning that sometimes a breach unfortunately can and will occur. This is especially true in an environment like healthcare, where the potential value of the information that can be compromised is so high.
Under HIPAA, if a doctor, hospital, or other provider does suffer a breach, the Secretary of Health and Human Services must be notified. If more than 500 people in a particular state or jurisdiction have been affected, the media must be notified as well.
This is all in service of one of the things that HIPAA was built to accomplish in the first place: giving people as much visibility as possible into their sensitive medical information.
Essential Steps to Keep Your Organization HIPAA Compliant
- Know your HIPAA rules - Once you've made an effort to understand the rules laid out in HIPAA like the Security Rule and the Privacy Rule, verify that you understand exactly which ones apply to your organization and which ones might not.
- Conduct a thorough risk analysis - This way you know exactly what types of threats you are exposed to. If you don't offer telehealth, for example, you naturally don't have to worry about issues that might arise from insecure telehealth connections.
- Create a compliance plan - What are the actionable steps that you need to take to achieve and maintain compliance? These will vary depending on the organization.
- Establish accountability - HIPAA compliance is something that requires buy-in from everyone within an organization. If records get compromised due to user error from a newly hired employee who doesn't know your protocols, it ultimately doesn't matter - your practice isn't compliant and this must be addressed.
- Stay updated on HIPAA - Make every effort to stay up-to-date on changes to HIPAA as they occur and enact change when required.
- Document absolutely everything - Any change you make, even if it's something as seemingly innocent as swapping one vendor out with another, needs to be carefully documented to preserve the aforementioned audit trail.
- Timely breach reporting - If data breaches occur, report them to the appropriate parties immediately.
Transform Your Practice with PrognoCIS EHR
How Does PrognoCIS Help You Become and Stay HIPAA Compliant?
PrognoCIS, a Meaningful-Stage 3 certified EHR provides a powerful platform for secure data storage, retrieval and transmission. Provides HIPAA compliance in the following ways:
- Conduct Annual Pen Test
- PHI is encrypted at Rest and in Transit
- Annual review of documented policies and procedures
- Annual security risk assessment of the physical, technical, and administrative security to protect personal health information
- Designated Privacy Officer to oversee matters complying with HIPAA
- Annual HIPAA training for all employees
- Undergo DEA 1311 Audit every 2 years (required to support EPCS)
- Access Control – 2FA and Fingerprint Authentication for password protection
- Host in Amazon AWS (SOC compliance)
- BAA with customers, Sub-BAA (or contracts in general) with vendors
- Incident Management and Anonymous reporting
- Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
- Certified as per ONC Certification requirements for Health IT products
- Use AlertLogic CloudDefender tools and services to monitor and protect our cloud Environment
In a lot of ways, this has made robust EHR platforms like PrognoCIS even more valuable than many already assumed them to be. When you leverage one of these tools, the most immediate benefit you’re getting is one of productivity. You’re taking a lot of tasks that formerly required disparate platforms and are condensing everything down into a “single source of truth” for your organization. Things get more efficient, you start saving money, you improve patient experiences – everybody wins.
But think about how complicated HIPAA compliance becomes as it pertains to EHR if every one of these core functions still exists in its own separate silo:
Everything from a diagnosis to a treatment plan falls under the definition of what is covered under the HIPAA Privacy and Security rules.
Submitting invoices and claims electronically is convenient, yes - but that's also sensitive information that could be used to identify someone, so it needs to be protected.
Scheduling an appointment and sending a reminder, along with other case management duties like authorization requests or eligibility checks, certainly need to be executed with an eye towards HIPAA.
E-Prescription also known as eRx. This is also fundamental to the core of what is protected by HIPAA as it pertains to electronic health records. These are just a few of many examples. PrognoCIS in particular also offers a wide range of other features like revenue cycle management and medical credentialing as well. Attempting to remain HIPAA-compliant with even four separate solutions to handle these critical tasks quickly becomes an uphill battle. But when you bring everything together under one Software like PrognoCIS, which was built with HIPAA in mind, this all becomes one less thing that you have to worry about. It's certainly no longer something you have to let get in the way of offering patients the critical care that they need.
Key Takeaways
- HIPAA was signed into law in 1996 and governs the way that patient health records are not only created and stored, but shared and accessed as well.
- Anyone who comes into contact with or uses electronic health records with sensitive patient data must be HIPAA-compliant. This includes not only an organization like a private practice, but any other entity helping them on the administrative side of things and subcontractors as well.
- This means that if the EHR vendor you’re using isn’t HIPAA-compliant, your organization isn’t compliant either. This is true even if you’ve taken every other reasonable step to maintain that compliance in-house.
If you’d like to find out more information about what to look for in HIPAA-compliant EHR software, or if you’d just like to see how a solution like PrognoCIS can revolutionize your practice without sacrificing security to do it, please don’t delay - contact Bizmatics, Inc. today.
