HIPAA Compliance Checklist: Steps to Take to Become HIPAA-Compliant

  Data protection and network safety are basic issues for most ventures, yet none more than medical services. Because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), health information is exceptionally secured. It’s likewise the most significant information on the bootleg market, where clinical records are worth $250 each. The following greatest cost tag […]

Updated 21 February 2024

Ashish Chauhan
Ashish Chauhan

Global Delivery Head at Appventurez

 

Data protection and network safety are basic issues for most ventures, yet none more than medical services. Because of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), health information is exceptionally secured. It’s likewise the most significant information on the bootleg market, where clinical records are worth $250 each. The following greatest cost tag is only $5.40 for installment records. 

For medical care suppliers and mobile applications in the healthcare industry, following the HIPAA compliance checklist is an unquestionable requirement. HIPAA rules ensure patients’ health data, guaranteeing that it is put away safely, and utilized effectively. 

We will show the regulation modifications that have been implemented during the previous 25 years in our HIPAA compliance checklist for 2022. This page will serve as a comprehensive yet simple HIPAA compliance guide, covering all you need to know about HIPAA.

Table Of Contents

1- What is HIPAA Compliance?

2- Who needs to be HIPAA Compliant?

3- 7-Step HIPAA Compliance Checklist to become a compliant

4- What are the HIPAA Rules & Regulations?

5- Looking to the Future

6- Elements to be included in a HIPAA Compliance App 

7- How Appventurez can help you?

FAQ’s

What is HIPAA Compliance?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates that business partners and covered entities preserve and secure Protected Health Information (PHI). That’s legalese for “protecting people’s health-care information.”

hipaa secured data elements

Let’s get to know the terms that compliance includes:

1- Protected Health Information (PHI)

Secured Health Information (PHI) is your/my/everybody’s medical services information. PHI is the element that HIPAA attempts to secure and keep hidden. The Safe Harbor Rule recognizes what sort of information you should eliminate to de-arrange PHI.

2- Covered Entity

A covered element is a person in a medical care field that utilizes and approaches PHI. They are specialists, medical caretakers, and insurance agencies.

3- Business Associate

Business partners are people that work with a canvassed element in a non-medical services limit and are similarly liable for keeping up HIPAA privacy and security rules as covered elements while developing healthcare mobile apps. They are legal counselors, bookkeepers, chairmen, and IT staff that work in the medical care industry and approach PHI.rs who work in the healthcare industry and have access to PHI.

Who needs to be HIPAA Compliant?

HIPAA is a federal law that regulates the healthcare business. Compliance standards apply to three categories of organizations in general.

1- Covered entities 

By conducting treatment or other procedures and receiving payments for health services, they are directly involved in the creation and transmission of PHI. HIPAA laws apply to these businesses in their entirety.

2- Business associates 

organizations that come into contact with protected health information from covered entities but aren’t engaged in its development This category includes a wide range of businesses that provide services to the healthcare industry.

3- Subcontractors 

Business colleagues employ companies to assist them with specialized specialist jobs. Because they may have access to PHI, HIPAA regulations apply to them as well.

7-Step HIPAA Compliance Checklist to become a compliant

To become HIPAA compliant, you don’t have much pressure as it isn’t vastly different from any 21st-century information security strategy. Besides, building a solid information security system can assist you with looking after compliance. Here are the vital advances you should actualize and follow while contemplating how to hire healthcare app developers to become HIPAA compliant: 

1- Build Policies of Privacy & Security

Turning out to be HIPAA compliant requires more than just adhering to HIPAA Security and Privacy Rules. Covered substances and business partners should likewise demonstrate that they’ve been proactive about adapting HIPAA compliance requirements by making protection and security strategies. 

These arrangements should be reported, imparted to staff, and consistently refreshed. Executives should prepare the HIPAA compliance checklist during direction and at any rate once per year, and they should verify (recorded as a hard copy) that they see all HIPAA security risk assessment strategies.

2- Implement Security Safeguards

The Security Rule requires three sorts of protections that covered elements and business partners should have set up to make sure about ePHI — including:

1- Administrative Safeguards: Organizations should report security the board measures, assign security faculty, receive data access to the executive’s framework, give the labor force security preparation, and intermittently survey all security conventions. 

2- Physical Safeguards: Organizations should have the option to control who approaches actual offices where ePHI is put away. They should likewise make sure about all workstations and gadgets that store or communicate ePHI.

3- Technical Safeguards

Organizations should approach controls to tie down ePHI in the EHR and different information bases to guarantee representatives just observe information they’re approved to see. Information should be encoded when it is very still and during travel, which makes the requirement for secure email, HIPAA Compliant Texting, and HIPAA Compliant checklist approaches.

Associations should likewise have review controls for all equipment and programming that oversee or communicate ePHI to guarantee they meet HIPAA compliance terminology for security rule necessities. Furthermore, there should be respectability controls to guarantee that ePHI isn’t inappropriately altered or erased. 

4- Manage Associate Agreements

Prior to offering PHI to business partners, all the crucial elements should get “agreeable affirmations” that the business partner is HIPAA compliant and can successfully protect the information, and the information should enter a BAA (Bachelor Associate Agreement).

All BAAs should be surveyed every year and refreshed to reflect any adjustment in the idea of the business partner relationship.

5- Execute Breach Notification Plan

A HIPAA compliance app doesn’t generally push associations into difficulty, particularly on the off chance that they can demonstrate the penetration was inadvertent and that they gave it their best shot to forestall such breaks. In any case, neglecting to report breaks exacerbates things.

hipaa common violation factors

6- Compliance Conduct & Audit Risks

Turning out to be HIPAA compliant is certifiably not a one-and-done measure. HHS requires covered substances and business partners to lead ordinary (in any event yearly) reviews of all regulatory, specialized, and actual shields to recognize consistent holes. 

Associations should then make composed remediation designs that plainly disclose how they intend to turn around HIPAA infringement and when this will occur.

7- Create Listed Documents

Associations should record all HIPAA rules and regulations — including protection and security strategies, hazard evaluations and self-reviews, remediation plans, and staff instructional meetings. OCR will survey this documentation during HIPAA reviews and compliance reports.

HIPAA compliance isn’t only the law – it will secure your client’s information and guarantee that your business thrives in the time of digitized clinical records. The HIPAA compliance checklist isn’t simply limited to medical care systems.

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What are the HIPAA Rules & Regulations?

From that point forward, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has added a progression of HIPAA compliance decisions that require medical care associations — and their business partners — to ensure tolerant protection and secure patient information. The purpose of HIPAA regulations include: 

1- Security Rule

HIPAA security rules disclose to them how to do it. All the more explicitly, the Security Rule sets public guidelines for the insurance of electronically ensured health data (ePHI) — including how that information ought to be taken care of, kept up, and communicated. 

2- Privacy Rule

The HIPAA Privacy Rule plots how medical care suppliers can utilize understanding information, what they can reveal without the patient’s consent, and to whom. The standard likewise ensures patients the “Option to Access” a large portion of their own health data and get duplicates of their clinical records.

3- Enforcement Rule

The Enforcement Rule enables HHS to uphold the Privacy and Security Rules. It gives OCR the power to examine HIPAA objections, lead compliance surveys, perform schooling and effort, and pay fines of up to $1.5 million. 

A year ago, OCR punished 10 associations, for a sum of $12.27 million. OCR additionally works with the Department of Justice to allude to conceivable criminal infringement of HIPA.

4- Breach Notification Rule

Health and Human Services (HHS) characterize a break as “an impermissible use or revelation under the Privacy Rule that bargains the security or security of the ensured health data.” This rule is implemented in all the best self-care apps utilized by worldwide users.

The Breach Notification Rule requires covered elements and business partners to tell OCR when ePHI has been penetrated. The Breach Notification Rule diagrams which kinds of breaks should be accounted for and how.

5- Omnibus Rule

Most outstandingly, the Omnibus Rule characterizes the job of business partners, which were not already dependent upon HIPAA rules and regulations, and diagrams the rules for Business Associate Agreements (BAAs). 

The Omnibus Rule additionally presented new arrangements needed by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act — part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Looking to the Future

Things have altered considerably more after the implementation of the final omnibus regulation in 2013. The floppy disc-using legislators of 1996 could not have foreseen a world in which personal phones serve as the majority of people’s primary computers. Things have evolved in the technology world, and HIPAA has usually adapted with it.

We live in a time where being open and share our societal standards. Open networks outnumber closed networks. When do privacy rules fit in in a society where everything is digital and instantly available?

Wearable designing for health gadgets has also grown in popularity. Such gadgets communicate PHI directly to doctors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

As it turns out, one of the reasons most individuals feel secure getting medical help is secrecy. HIPAA ensures that patients do not experience prejudice or public disgrace as a result of whatever diagnosis they may have. It is now more critical than ever to discover a means to keep ePHI secure in a changing environment.

worldwide healthcare crm market graph

Elements to be included in a HIPAA Compliance App 

Obviously, it’s essential to consider whether your application will be utilized to store or communicate ensured health data, paying little attention to mobile app development strategies will help you get a great product for the HIPAA compliance checklist for software development. 

1- User Interaction/Communication

This is one of the core elements where developers can get entangled with HIPAA compliance requirements. We’re so used to working in email and application notices that scrutinizing whether they can be utilized by any means, or in an agreeable way, is an unfamiliar idea. 

2- Push Notifications

As we have said previously, cell phones are especially uncertain gadgets and the local pop-up messages that are utilized by numerous applications to inform clients of updates and changes risk abusing the protection guidelines laid out in HIPAA privacy and security rules. 

3- PHI in the App

The way that an individual has gotten solutions from a covered element is PHI. Moreover, the name or address of an individual, whether openly accessible, is likewise PHI. Most of the mobile app development frameworks will provide the scope to integrate this API for better coordination.

4- Database/API Calls

HIPAA rules and regulations are designed to ensure that any entity that collects, maintains, or uses confidential patient information handles it appropriately. It may be time-consuming to work your way through this HIPAA compliance checklist.

However, you must cover every single aspect of it. Your compliance is mandated by law and is also the right thing to do to ensure that patients can trust you with their personal health information.

How Appventurez can help you in making apps like HIPAA Compliance?

 We are one of the leading technology partners for many corporations across the globe. We understand and adapt the policies of every industry and make sure to transform the business into a reliable brand under them. HIPAA compliance checklist is completely agreeable to us and we offer solutions that can help healthcare and medical centers to follow this compliance.

Fortunately for you, Appventurez a mobile app development company can help you simplify the process of achieving HIPAA compliance in your cloud-HIPAA release forms company. Learn more about how we can help to automate your HIPAA compliance through our demo.

 

FAQ’s

1- What are HIPAA compliance requirements?

HIPAA-compliant companies must assess possible threats to PHI confidentiality. Administrative procedures, physical security, IT system security, and a crisis recovery strategy are the critical topics. They must create an action plan to eliminate the risks after recognizing them.

2- What happens if you fail a HIPAA audit?

The severity of the offenses will determine the punishment. Minor transgressions should be listed in your audit report, and you should be able to show documentation of the steps you took to secure the data. However, severe infractions might result in fines.

3- What are the most common HIPAA violations?

Most common HIPAA violations result from the lack of employee awareness and flaws in internal security practices. PHI data could be accidentally shared outside the company even if the top security precautions protect it. 

Ashish Chauhan
Ashish Chauhan

Global Delivery Head at Appventurez

Ashish governs the process of software delivery operations. He ensures the end product attains the highest remarks in qualitative analysis and is streamlined to the clientele’s objectives. He has over a decade of experience as an iOS developer and teams mentorship.


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