HIPAA COMPLIANT DATA CENTER

Securing Protected Health Information (PHI)

Sharing health information becomes much easier when an electronic medical record system is adopted by hospitals, doctor’s offices, clinics, or any other type of business in the healthcare industry. An electronic medical record system speeds up the process when dealing with insurance companies by allowing patients’ medical records to be accessed online.  Doctors can share patients’ information such as scans, diagnoses, or medical records over the internet, rather than insurance companies calling and waiting for businesses to fax over important documents.  Having an online HIPAA server provides a medical database for doctors to cross reference and insurance companies to speed up the paperwork.

Storing protected health information (PHI) electronically inherently exposes that data to cybersecurity risks. With the increasing amount of regulations and penalties imposed by the Department of Health & Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights for PHI breaches, there is now a growing trend of outsourcing services to Datacenter and Hosting service providers in the industry. When data centers engage or deal with PHI they are required to comply with the HIPAA Regulation and establish the same level of administrative safeguards, physical safeguards, technical safeguards, and conduct ongoing due diligence as the Covered Entity (Healthcare Institutes).

What Are the HIPAA Compliance Requirements for Data Storage?

Data centers must provide adequate HIPAA data security measures to protect the data of their clients. These security measures include:

• • SSL Certificates & HTTPS – All types of web-based access to a patient’s PHI are encrypted and secure to prevent unauthorized connections.
  • AES Encryption – Advanced Encryption Standard used to encrypt PHI stored at rest, on servers
  • A Virtual or Dedicated Private Firewall Services – A secure firewall will prevent any unauthorized access to protected files.
  • Remote VPN Access – Those with proper credentials will be able to access the protected network using a remote computer.
  • Disaster Recovery – A documented backup recover plan in case of lost PHI or server malfunction.
  • Dedicated IP Address – Private IP address that is cutoff from the public Internet

• Redundant, Isolated, and Secure database and web servers

• • High speed connection with hardware that can run a variety of software and applications for communicating with multiple types of devices.

• Separate Test Server

HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a series of stringent security and privacy standards that govern the use and disclosure of sensitive protected health information (PHI). Compliance with HIPAA provides assurance that proper and continual measures are taken to protect PHI. It enables HIPAA-regulated customers to use OFFSITE, LLC’s products and services to provide secure user access to HIPAA-sensitive data stored in our data center.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was established as a security standard for protecting the privacy and confidentiality of electronic Protected Health Information in the Healthcare industry. As per this HIPAA Rule, covered entities who store, transmit or process electronically protected health information are required to implement administrative, physical, and technical safeguards as stated in the regulation.

This is to ensure that the safeguards implemented preserve the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of ePHI while preventing the possibility of unauthorized access to PHI.