EMR HIPAA Compliance Facts You Must Know

As the patient’s EHR data consists of all the vital patient information.

It becomes vital to ensure the hospital staff can only access the data required to perform their duties.

According to the regulation, you will have to establish who can access the data to perform tasks and who cannot.

Authorization is defined when administrative and integrity standards are involved.

For example – a person carrying out blood sample tests can only see parts of the patient data related to the test they need to perform. Nothing more.

The EMR/EHR development process must have the feature to provide limited access to the users.

The privileges and rights of the employees should be configured into the EMR/EHR systems by the organizations using the limited access feature.

Whenever a user logs in to the HIPAA-Compliant EHR software, he/she will have to authenticate who they are.

Once the user logs in then only they get access to the privileges and rights mentioned before.

Several ways of authentication include

• Passwords
• PIN codes
• Keycards
• Biometric access

Though passwords are preferred by employees, they’re breached most frequently by cyberattacks.

Hence, training the staff to follow protocols becomes a vital step in ensuring EMR HIPAA compliance.

This feature is crucial for the security measures taken in a medical organization.

As the name suggests, the system will automatically log off if it is not used for a certain time.

It prevents unauthorized access if a person has logged in with their credentials and left their system unattended.

If a system has inactivity for a pre-set period, it logs off automatically.

Similar features were introduced in healthcare cloud computing and automated healthcare solutions to ensure data confidentiality and integrity.

Audit trails are used in every industry to prevent unauthorized system access.

Though it is a preventive feature, it implies more toward a deterrence feature.

Audit trails keep the administrators informed about the happenings in the organization.

It logs every access, request, transfer, log-in, etc. conducted on the HIPAA-compliant EHR software.

These logs can be seen periodically to ensure that any employee has deviated from the established protocols.

Audit trails have become a common feature of cyber forensics services worldwide.

It is one of the best methods to ensure the integrity and privacy of medical data.

Though encryption of patients’ data is voluntary, healthcare organizations will have to provide strong reasons for not doing so.

If they choose to encrypt the medical data then, they’ll have to decide what information to encrypt and when.

During transmission, the medical data is most vulnerable.

Hence, HIPAA-compliant EHRs usually encrypt medical data during transmissions.

It is a vital part of EHR/EMR HIPAA compliance measures.

During the development of a HIPAA-compliant EHR, it is a crucial consideration.

The developers decide on hosting and the state of the hosting infrastructure by considering the following measure for HIPAA compliance.

• Physical
• Administrative
• Technological

Depending on the chosen hosting, the healthcare organization will be accountable for the measures undertaken to ensure that HIPAA regulations are followed.

Hosting options include

• On-premises
• Cloud-hosted
• Platform-as-a-Service