The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a complex set of regulations that can be difficult to navigate. HIPAA law was written to apply to a variety of organizations working in healthcare including single doctor practices, large hospital groups, business associates (BAs), and managed service providers (MSPs). Additionally, there are new requirements added to the regulation that organizations working in healthcare are expected to adhere to. Since the regulation is not clearly laid out, stating that organizations must implement “reasonably appropriate measures” to secure protected health information (PHI), figuring out what is appropriate for your organization can be a daunting task. As such, finding the right automated HIPAA compliance tool can save your organization a lot of time and money. 

What is Automated HIPAA Compliance?

Automated HIPAA compliance is a means of managing your HIPAA compliance program with ease. A good automated HIPAA compliance tool will have all that is required by HIPAA built into an easy-to-use tool. When choosing an automated HIPAA compliance tool, you should look for built in self-audits, customized remediation plans, policies and procedures relevant to your organization, business associate management, and a breach notification process. 

Automated HIPAA Compliance with The Guard

The Guard is Compliancy Group’s cloud-based automated HIPAA compliance tool. Within the Guard is everything your organization needs to prove your “good faith effort” towards HIPAA compliance. 

• Self-audits

HIPAA requires covered entities (CEs) to complete six self-audits annually, five for business associates. Self-audits allow you to measure your current security practices to ensure that you are fulfilling the HIPAA requirements. The Guard has all of the self-audits built into the automated HIPAA compliance platform. The self-audits are easy to complete, with most structured as yes or no questions.

• Gap identification and remediation plans

By completing your self-audits, The Guard automatically identifies gaps in your organization’s security practices. Gap identification is an integral part of the process as it allows for remediation plans to be created that are specific to your organization’s needs. Remediation plans are meant to address your gaps, ensuring that you adhere to HIPAA standards.

• Custom policies and procedures

Several organizations are fined each year for their lack of, or insufficient, policies and procedures. Policies and procedures must be specific to your organization’s business processes, and must be reviewed annually to account for any changes in your organization. In addition, they must be created with HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules in mind. The Guard creates policies and procedures for your organization with minimal effort on your part. The only things you will be responsible for adding to the policies and procedures are your organization’s name and logo, your compliance officer, and your privacy officer. The rest is completed using our automated HIPAA compliance tool.

• Staff training

Once your policies and procedures are created, it is required for employees to be trained. Employee training on policies and procedures, and HIPAA requirements, must be conducted annually. Training must be tracked and documented to ensure that all employees have been trained in a timely manner. The Guard provides your employees with all of the training they need. Each employee will be given a unique login credentials, enabling their progress to be tracked. Training is structured to be self-paced, allowing users to save their progress and pick up where they left off at their convenience. Our training module allows employees to legally attest that they have read and understood all of the material that they were trained on.

• Business associate management

Before choosing a business associate (BA) to work with, it is important that you vet the vendor. Organizations that fail to adequately vet vendors are held liable if their BA experiences a breach. The Guard allows you to send out vendor questionnaires to all of your business associates, so that gaps in their security practices can be identified. From this, remediation plans are created for your business associates. To move forward with this vendor, remediation efforts must be made to ensure that your PHI is protected.

Business associate management also includes business associate agreements (BAAs). A BAA is a legal document that states that both parties agree to be HIPAA compliant, and they are each responsible for their own compliance. A BAA must be signed before it is permitted to share PHI with your vendors, without a BAA both parties would be held liable in the event of a breach. The Guard’s automated HIPAA compliance tool handles this for you. BAAs are sent to all of your vendors and then stored in The Guard.

• Breach notification and incident response

When an organization working in healthcare is subject to a data breach, they must report the incident. A meaningful breach, affecting more than 500 individuals, must be reported within 60 days of discovery to the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), affected individuals, and the media. A minor breach, affecting less than 500 individuals, must be reported by the end of the calendar year to HHS OCR and affected individuals. There must be a means for employees to report breaches anonymously. The Guard allows for this and enables incident tracking.

• Audit support 

If you organization is subject to a HIPAA audit, we provide full support. Our Audit Response Team will work with your organization to get you through the audit. In addition, all of the documentation stored in The Guard will serve as your supporting documentation that you have made your “good faith effort” towards HIPAA compliance. Over the years we have been involved in several HIPAA audits on behalf of our clients, and we have NEVER failed an audit!

Need Assistance with HIPAA Compliance?

Compliancy Group can help! Our cloud-based compliance software, the Guard™, gives you the flexibility to work on your HIPAA compliance from anywhere that has an internet connection. Our software will guide you through our implementation process enabling you to Achieve, Illustrate, and Maintain™ HIPAA compliance.