5 Tips for Remaining HIPAA Compliant

As Amazon’s Alexa becomes increasingly concerned with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance, we thought we’d share 5 quick tips to help keep individual physician practices HIPAA compliant.

Backup & Failover

Having a backup of your data is critical, making sure that your data is backing up correctly is equally as important. Ask your IT support to conduct a regular audit, and be aware of where and how frequently backups are being created and stored. If the worst occurs, make sure that your team has a functioning failover plan that can be expediently deployed so that your practice experiences the least amount of impact to regular operations.

Vet Your Business Associates

You should maintain a regularly updated list of business associates, storing signed Business Associate Agreements in a secure and centralized location. Limit your liability, know and control who is handling your patients protected health information.

Monitor Employees

Have your practice manager or IT team conduct regular audits of who has access to what. Taking the time to make sure that your employees are operating within the parameters of best practices can potentially save you the headache (and cost) of compromised security. Keep your policies and procedures updated, differentiating between users, limiting rights, and terminating user rights for employees leaving the practice.

Security Risk Assessments

The technology you use, software, and hardware that you keep in your practice’s environment (both electronically and physically) is constantly changing. Ongoing security risk assessments should work to help you identify the protections you currently have in place against the vulnerabilities that may present themselves.

Outsource

Make sure that your IT helpdesk or Managed Service Provider is well acquainted with the rigorous and changing environment of HIPAA compliance standards, and security risks that healthcare organizations face. Finding the right team, can save you money down the road by avoiding the expense and risk of litigation and burdensome fines.

If you were a vegan, would you go eat at a steakhouse? Sure they make food, but they don’t make the food you require to sustain your diet. In the same way, don’t just bring on any managed service provider – bring in an MSP that has experience in healthcare. Here’s our shameless self-promotion – our team has over 13 years of experience in the healthcare sector, we pride ourselves in supporting compliant environments while establishing optimal practice workflow.

Looking for more tips? As always, we encourage readers to consult with the enormous amount resources available from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services here.

Not sure if your IT environment is secure? Let our team help! Click here to book a meeting with us today.

AlphaRidge is a leading MSP located in NY.  With over 15 years of managed services experience, AlphaRidge experts have solutions for your specific needs. We place the highest value on the protection and privacy of your data, and we maintain transparency to you with every service we provide. Our white glove on-site and remote service is designed to demystify IT and streamline your concerns into rapid solutions, so that you can focus on what you do best. Consider our team, your team.

Disclaimer: This blog post, in addition to any posts presented on the AlphaRidge blog are written for informational purposes only, and should not be seen as technological, financial, healthcare, legal, etc advise.