When the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was signed into law in 1996, it ushered in a series of changes to how healthcare operates. The federal law established baseline standards for protecting the health records of patients, and it also gave patients greater rights to access their health records. The law also added a level of confusion to a complex marketplace. [...]
When HIPAA was signed into law in 1996, modernizing and streamlining medical records access goals were part of the primary focus of the law. That same year, it became possible to send faxes over the internet. Today you’re more likely to see old-style telephone fax machines in a museum than in an office. Internet faxing (or efaxing) has become the preferred choice for most businesses. [...]
Are you looking for a chatbot to help with patient communications? Using a chatbot can be an effective way to answer patient questions without having to use precious human resources. With staffing issues in healthcare, devoting an employee to run your chats can be a drain on your business. When choosing which tool is right for your business, you must ensure that the tool is HIPAA [...]
You know what the risks are, but how do you explain them to your healthcare clients in a way that they’ll understand? Most people are not very tech-savvy, and they definitely don’t know the lingo. That makes your job part translator, part advisor, and part evangelist. There’s an art to communicating cyber risks in healthcare to your clients. You don’t want to [...]
Improved technology and the recent pandemic created new opportunities for healthcare practitioners and their patients to communicate electronically. OhMD has developed a platform rich with features, including two-way texting, video visits, and patient calling. While its features may be impressive, potential users must ask, is OhMD HIPAA compliant? What Makes a Software Tool HIPAA Compliant? Regarding software, there are specific indications of [...]
Thirty years ago, copper-wire landlines connected most Americans’ phoned. Today mobile cellular and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) have marginalized the old technology. One of the better-known VoIP providers is Ooma. They provide phone services for millions of users in homes and businesses around the country. But is Ooma HIPAA compliant? What Makes a Software Tool HIPAA Compliant? When it comes to [...]
A recent poll of webinar attendees found that barely one-third may be HIPAA compliant, based upon responses to a single question. Conducting an annual Security Risk Analysis is one of the foundational requirements of HIPAA compliance. Still, only 33.5 percent of 146 respondents answered affirmatively to the question, “Have you completed your HIPAA Risk Analysis for this year?” The poll was conducted [...]
One main focus of HIPAA regulations is ensuring the privacy of the protected health information (PHI) of patients. Most people immediately think about the protection and security of PHI in physical or electronic (ePHI) formats, but what about when PHI is verbalized? Does talking about a patient violate HIPAA? If so, what precautions do healthcare providers need to take to avoid breaching [...]
It’s sometimes hard to believe that the acronym GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) has been around for less than 20 years. Developed as a response to the financial shenanigans discovered when the dot.com bubble burst, GRC has evolved into an integrated collection of capabilities that enable an organization to achieve objectives reliably, address uncertainty, and act with integrity. Today GRC has expanded far [...]
One of the trendy marketing terms being used by equipment and service providers in the security space is “HIPAA Compliant Environment.” It’s usually used to describe items like highly secure protocols, including operational environment controls, workload (VM and application) hardening, data at rest and in transit protection, identity, and access management. All of these tools are very useful to ensure privacy and [...]
