Tip of the Week: 3 Crucial Pieces of HIPAA Compliance

If your work requires you to store medical data, you should be aware of how important your data security is, as a problem could potentially put your business at risk of closing up shop permanently. Security has to be a priority with so many regulations setting compliance standards that must be followed. How can you balance the effectiveness of your business without undermining its security?

Regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) cause your business to have to work to remain compliant. However, this work becomes easier if you formulate your storage of sensitive materials--including medical records--to meet these regulations. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over some steps you can take to optimize your basic business security.

Encrypt your Data
Surprisingly, HIPAA doesn’t dictate that your business data be encrypted. However, this doesn’t mean that you should neglect to implement encryption, as it may just save your bacon if you are the target of an attempted data breach. When data is encrypted, it is scrambled so that it can only be properly viewed with an encryption key. A solid, military-grade encryption should be enough to discourage the average hacker.

Protect Your Data with Comprehensive Security Measures
Would you rather stop an attack before it affects you, or wait until your infrastructure has been compromised? If you’re like most people, you’d select the first option, which means that you want to make sure that you have a Unified Threat Management solution in place. This solution leverages a firewall, content filter, antivirus and spam protection to protect your company and its assets. While this doesn’t render your company impervious to threats, they greatly reduce the number of them that you have to worry about.

Restrict User Access Based on Roles
It stands to reason that the more people who have access to something, the likelier it is for threats to get in, too. However, limiting a user’s access to the resources they need to complete their work helps to cut down on your potential exposure. This is especially important in an industry that is as data-heavy as healthcare, with records as extensive as medical ones are.

If your business handles sensitive information like medical records, you may not be compliant to industry regulations, and become subject to fines. Digital Seattle is here to help by ensuring that your data is secure and you meet all compliances that may apply to you. Give us a call at (206) 709-9556 to learn more.