Electronic Health Reporter

Organizations are facing greater scrutiny in this increasingly regulated world. And in 2021, the focus on compliance is expected to increase. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) affects thousands of organizations across the U.S, including many who support healthcare providers instead of directly delivering care themselves. On top of it, the challenges of maintaining round the clock compliance with HIPAA regulations keep adding up. 

While technology has brought upon new challenges in healthcare data security, technologies have also changed the way companies collaborate. For example, the advent of modern HIPAA compliance software has brought about a high level of flexibility in logging in reports and communication that allows employees, co-workers, and managers to connect easily. This helps managers to have overall transparency and a clear picture of their entire HIPAA compliance program.

In today’s article, we will take a closer look at the main challenges faced by healthcare organizations in maintaining or implementing HIPAA compliance and how our HIPAA compliance software can help you address these problems.

Simplifying the Challenges of HIPAA – 9 Pain Points for Administrators

Administrative Burden 

You don’t have to acquire several solutions to ensure each critical element of HIPAA is being addressed separately. HIPAA Ready integrates all compliance modules and allows you to ensure compliance with just one solution. The federal law HIPAA was, in fact, designed to reduce administrative burden. And if your compliance efforts are proving to be more difficult rather than reducing your burden, then your entire program is meaningless.

Areas of Vulnerabilities 

In addition to technology, numerous factors can affect the security of your health information data. For example, growth in your business will result in an increased number of processes, devices, and even employees. Hence, an increased number of risks are associated with the growth of your business. Risk analysis and risk management are an integral part of HIPAA compliance. Performing risk analysis can understandably be time-consuming and costly if you hire third parties to do it for you. But with HIPAA Ready, you can easily identify areas of vulnerabilities and mitigate them to the extent possible with easy to use a risk analysis and management feature.

Training and Educating Staff  

If you are in the healthcare industry, you already know how crucial HIPAA training is. But this is one area most organizations struggle with. How to deliver training to employees? How to schedule these training sessions? Where should I maintain documentation for these training sessions? Have all the employees undergone training?

The challenge is even greater for larger organizations. But you do not have to worry about managing HIPAA training if you are using HIPAA Ready. HIPAA Ready will enable you to effortlessly manage and provide HIPAA training to members of your workforce and ensure that everyone is on the same page. 

Vendor Oversight 

Have you identified all your business associates? Do you have a business associate contract with all your third-party vendors that have access to PHI? You must maintain business associate contracts with all your third-parties. Perform proper due diligence over the life of the relationship with a vendor. With HIPAA Ready, you can make sure that the right documents are in place to ensure that critical elements of HIPAA are addressed by the vendors.

Transparency and Accountability 

HIPAA Ready can be accessed with any mobile device from anywhere and enables users to log information that can be viewed by anyone. This allows administrators to investigate an activity before it turns into a data breach. 

Inadequate Implementation 

The fact is, failing to fully implement compliance is far more common than prospering. Even if you do not know about all the HIPAA compliance requirements, you can still ensure full compliance. HIPAA Ready already integrates all the crucial modules of HIPAA compliance. Transform your sub-standard compliance program into a full-proof rock-solid compliance program by making sure that all the critical elements of HIPAA are in place.

All-In-One Documentation Management for HIPAA Compliance 

Replace your huge loads of paperwork with our robust compliance management software. Having hundreds of documents stored in different places will prove to be difficult when the OCR comes knocking. With HIPAA Ready, new documents can be easily classified and stored in one place while allowing providers to fulfill records retention requirements. Information can be accessed and retrieved remotely, which helps providers save time from searching and retrieving siloed data. 

Identify the Exact Location of PHI  

One of the main challenges of maintaining HIPAA compliance, especially for large organizations, is keeping an accurate and detailed report of all electronic devices containing ePHI (electronic protected health information) in multiple locations and knowing when sensitive information is surfacing outside of the secure locations. PHI is highly valuable and often used to commit fraud in the form of medical identity theft. With HIPAA Ready, you can get a clear picture of where your sensitive data and devices are located. You can use this information to mitigate risks and identify employees that may need additional training on security management.

Revising Policies and Procedures  

Last but not least, policies and procedures need to be reviewed periodically. HIPAA Ready allows providers to easily revise and update policies and procedures to account for the changes made by the OCR or changes in the organization’s systems or workflow. 

How to distribute the revised policies to all the employees? You do not have to worry. HIPAA Ready will notify relevant individuals across the organization. 

HIPAA Ready – Simple, Straightforward, and To-The-Point

I bet you can relate to all the points discussed in this article. HIPAA Ready is a cloud-based HIPAA compliance software built for one purpose – to reduce your administrative burden and cost. Try our free trial now, and experience how simple it is to overcome the challenges of HIPAA compliance.

HIPAA Ready costs $10 per user, per month (no hidden charge). If you are interested in learning more about HIPAA Ready, get in touch with us today.