The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare organizations to keep the data of their patients from being improperly accessed or deleted.
Earlier this year, HIPAA was modified by the Department of Health and Human Services. The new HIPAA rules went into effect on March 26, 2013, and the deadline for complying with the new regulations is September 23, 2013, which is less than a week away. Healthcare organizations are required by the new HIPAA rules to give patients electronic copies of their electronic medical records upon request, to limit their sharing of private medical information for “marketing and fundraising purposes,” and to never sell patients’ medical information without their permission.
Healthcare organizations had already been required by HIPAA, a law that was passed more than 15 years ago in 1996, to ensure the privacy of their patients’ data by implementing “reasonable and appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to prevent intentional or unintentional use or disclosure of protected health information.”
Users of IronOrbit Application Hosting and Hosted Desktops in the healthcare industry have never had to spend much time or effort achieving HIPAA compliance, however; that’s because IronOrbit Application Hosting and Hosted Desktop solutions comply with HIPAA’s “reasonable and appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards” provision by default. The Orbital Security System included with all of IronOrbit’s solutions protects data from inappropriate access with features such as:
- Biometric palm readers and 24x7x365 closed-circuit video monitoring and alarm monitoring at our data centers
- Internal access control and audit trail
- Firewalls, IPS/IDS, antivirus, spam blocker, and content filtering
- Fully-automated data backups
- Dedicated server hosting (all IronOrbit deployments are hosted on their own private server or servers)
Healthcare organizations of all sizes, including private practices, hospitals, insurance companies, and medical payment processors, have signed up for Application Hosting and Hosted Desktop solutions from IronOrbit explicitly in order to comply with HIPAA regulations. Our personnel will draw on their experience of helping dozens of other healthcare organizations to get HIPAA-certified to guide you through the compliance process.
Other reasons that healthcare organizations should select Compliance Hosting from IronOrbit include:
- Our solutions can be securely accessed from anywhere with any Internet-connected computer, tablet, or smartphone. Now doctors and nurses can access a central database of electronic medical records no matter where they are in a facility.
- IronOrbit Application Hosting and Hosted Desktop solutions don’t require healthcare organizations to purchase any on-site servers or hire any additional on-premise IT personnel (our solutions come with 24x7x365 technical support and around-the-clock performance and security monitoring). Medical organizations shouldn’t let frustrating and time-consuming IT management tasks distract them from providing actual healthcare services.
- The IT infrastructure of most healthcare organizations usually includes more applications than just a single EMR or EHR system; it usually has business productivity applications like Microsoft Office and accounting software like QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Enterprise, or Sage 50, too. Fortunately, IronOrbit is capable of hosting any application, and with IronOrbit Hosted Desktops users can launch and access all of their applications from a single interface.
Sign up for Compliance Hosting before the September 23 deadline by contacting an IronOrbit sales representative at [email protected] or (888) 753-5060 today!