What Is Data Privacy in Healthcare?

Data privacy in healthcare has been a serious issue for hundreds of years. It speaks to the very nature of doctor-patient confidentiality. Obviously, to supply competent care, your doctor has to know a fantastic deal about you. That features stuff you wouldn’t wish to be spread around casually. Nonetheless, within the digital age, data privacy in healthcare is a fair more serious issue.   

To know today’s issues with data privacy in healthcare, we want to deal with the problem of information privacy generally. Data privacy is the principle of handling sensitive and private data properly. On this case, properly means ensuring that the information stays confidential and unchanged. 

Data protection could be broken down into three sub-categories: protection, security, and privacy. Classic data protection is usually about keeping copies of the information secure in order that it could actually be restored. Data security is more about keeping unauthorized users from accessing, destroying, or corrupting data. Finally, data privacy concerns itself with laws, policies, and standards of practice that prevent the improper release of personal or personal data by authorized users. 

HIPAA is an acronym that stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. It’s a U.S. federal law that created national standards for ensuring the privacy of private information related to healthcare and medical insurance issues. For the aim of this discussion, an important facets of HIPAA are the Privacy Rule and the Security Rule that support it. 

The HIPAA Privacy Rule defines Protected Health Information (PHI) and the covered entities (doctors, pharmacies, medical health insurance corporations, etc.) who’re required to guard health information while still making it freely available for valid healthcare purposes. The Privacy Rule permits certain uses and disclosures of PHI under specific conditions and forbids it in another circumstances. 

The Security Rule specifically calls for confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronically-stored PHI. 

HIPAA defines PHI as any individually identifiable health information held or transmitted by a covered entity or business associate. That is anything regarding an individual’s physical or mental health, provision of health care, or payment for those services.

With reference to being individually identifiable, things like names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers are specified, but that is not all. Health information can also be considered individually identifiable if it will be reasonable to imagine that it could possibly be used to discover an individual. 

It might be fair to assume that any individual or organization that deals with healthcare needs to keep up HIPAA compliance. And also you can be right. But they don’t seem to be the one ones.

HIPAA’s Privacy Rule should be followed by all healthcare providers, healthcare plans, and clearinghouses that transmit health information electronically in reference to HIPAA-covered transactions. Healthcare plans, on this context, include HMOs, Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare complement, and Medicare+Selection insurers. This also includes any healthcare plans that cover vision, dental, or prescription drug coverage. Group health plans sponsored by employers, churches, or the federal government fall throughout the definition, as do multi-employer health plans. (Group health plans which have fewer than 50 participants and are administered solely by an employer usually are not covered by this rule.) 

Perhaps more importantly, nonetheless, the Privacy Rule also applies to business associates of covered entities. Generally, this may be any person or organization that works with a covered entity and to whom individually identifiable health information is disclosed. 

In the event you perform any sort of services involving PHI, it’s essential to also comply with HIPAA’s provisions. This includes services like financial, legal, actuarial, accounting, accreditation, management, administration, data aggregation, and consulting.

It isn’t surprising that considered one of the most important issues referring to data privacy in healthcare is how you can stay HIPAA-compliant.

Here’s an outline of three chief ways to make sure user privacy:

Using HIPAA-certified services ensures that your healthcare providers have undergone substantial training to grasp the terms of HIPAA and know how you can do their job in compliance with those terms. In case your healthcare providers usually are not HIPAA-certified, the likelihood of them being in full compliance could also be called into query. 

One major expansion to the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. This was established in 2009 to update the information privacy provisions of HIPAA, especially when it comes to the requirement to store relevant data in a properly encrypted manner. 

Using a HITECH-certified hosting provider, like Liquid Web, ensures that the solutions offered are compliant with HIPAA security and privacy guidelines, including administrative, physical, and technical safeguard measures.

The PCI DSS was established to be certain that that any company that accepts, processes, stores, or transmits bank card payment information does so in a properly secure environment. Liquid Web is fully PCI DSS compliant as well. 

By now, you might be starting to grasp the importance of storing and transmitting your data in HIPAA-compliant ways. Liquid Web offers fully SOC 2 and three certified hosting, which is usually audited for each HIPAA and HITECH compliance. 

Data privacy in healthcare has never been a more necessary issue. Even without the specter of government intervention for non-compliance, it just makes good business sense to guard your clients, their customers, and yourself with hosting and related services that meet the very best standards within the industry.