Do the HIPAA Texting Rules Relate to You?
Healthcare experts, health insurance carriers, and third-party providers that have access to private health information or PHI, all fall under the HIPAA compliant text regulations.
Because such protected entities vary in dimension, these organizations must train their entire personnel concerning HIPAA guidelines and impose it across their whole company. This oftentimes consists of sub-contractors, that need to be trained on the appropriate handling of all PHI along with the repercussions of data violations. If correct training and analysis of your existing messaging system are not applied and taken seriously, it can cause severe charges ranging from significant penalties and dismissal from your task to criminal and lawsuit charges.
When Does HIPAA Conformity Put on Secure Texting?
The new revisions of HIPAA identify the interaction and accessibility to PHI in today’s healthcare environments utilizing smartphones.
With such technologies, the risk and eminence of a PHI violation boost substantially. This is multiplied further with the use of Wi-Fi and opens networks of mobile phones. An added threat is there with the danger of theft or loss of mobile devices as well as laptop computers. Due to these dangers, Secure Texting is only thought about HIPAA compliant when the list below problems exists:
- The company that houses as well as manages private health info controls that has accessibility to that PHI, as well as just how that details are used. These are done by pre-determined procedures and processes that satisfy HIPAA standards.
- Assessment of risks is carried out routinely to recognize the honesty of PHI and any prospective risk that may exist. Treatments are additionally to be developed when a breach happens.
- Encryption and physical data defense need to remain in the area for those individuals that depend on their individual gadgets, mobile, laptop, etc.) to share PHI or to access that information for professional use.
- A policy that covers the burglary or loss of a tool has to be kept in order so as to cover these types of scenarios. The policy must cover those users also that want to get rid of their personal tool to ensure that PHI can be cleaned remotely.
- A system is put in place to avoid the troubled storage space PHI on mobile devices used by both employees and subcontractors.