The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to develop standards and requirements for maintenance and transmission of health information that identifies individual patients. These standards are designed to improve efficiency and protect the security and confidentiality of electronic health information.

The HIPAA regulations are impacting healthcare in five major areas:

• Standard transactions
• Standard code sets
• Uniform identifiers
• Privacy standards
• Security standards

Privacy and security regulations will be the most difficult and costly to implement and maintain. These regulations are broad in scope, less definitive and require constant monitoring for ongoing compliance. Short implementation timeframes, additional staffing requirements and the requirements for a third party security network vulnerability assessment require that you look outside your organization for assistance.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelines only give general information about what is expected of healthcare providers. It provides guidance but provides no details about specific security practices. That is where the healthcare providers will need the most our security expertise, since they'll use that information to decide how to best proceed in protecting their critical information and systems.

The security assessment will include the evaluation of:

• Administrative Safeguards
  • Security Management Process
  • Assigned Security Responsibility
  • Workforce Security
  • Information Access Management
  • Security Awareness and Training
  • Security Incident Procedures
  • Contingency Plan
  • Evaluation
  • Business Associate Contracts and Other Arrangements
• Physical Safeguards
• Facility Access Controls
• Workstation Use
• Workstation Security
• Device and Media Controls
• Technical Safeguards
• Access Control
• Audit Controls
• Integrity
• Person or Entity Authentication
• Transmission Security
• Organizational Requirements
• Business Associate Contracts and Other Arrangements
• Requirements for Group Health Plans
• Policy, Procedures, and Documentation
• Policy and Procedures
• Documentation

Let us configure your network infrastructure to provide you with the security level you need.

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