While trying to sell their services and software, many businesses are facing questions from healthcare organizations “Is your software HIPAA certified?” or “Do you have HIPAA Certification?” or “Are you HIPAA compliant?” and many more of similar nature.
What is HIPAA compliant Software?
All covered entities are trying to ensure that they meet the HIPAA Privacy and Security rule requirements to be Compliant with HIPAA regulations. For achieving total HIPAA compliance, it is also necessary that all third-party tools, applications, and software meet HIPAA compliance requirements.
By ensuring that the third-party software, tool, or application is HIPAA compliant, covered entities reduce the chances of HIPAA violation. Different software will have different requirements based on the functionalities & processes performed by the software.
HIPAA compliant software is a requirement to ensure that all the privacy and security guidelines for HIPAA are being met.
Healthcare Software Developer: Things to Consider for achieving HIPAA Compliance
Covered entities have been advised by the HIPAA regulators to work with their software vendors in producing software that will help their privacy and security rule compliance efforts. Therefore, when performing the requirements analysis phase of systems design, you may be prompted by customers, who are covered entities, to provide an explanation of how your system design features map to various HIPAA security rule standards. In other cases, software applications will have to be redesigned or modified to fit specific security compliance objectives of individual covered entities.
If you are developing PHI-related software applications one person on the client side who will probably have input into the design requirements is the HIPAA Security Compliance Officer.
The HIPAA security rule provides criminal and civil liability in cases where covered entities experience security breaches due to not implementing whatever required standard as prescribed by the security rule. Healthcare-informed software developers will understand that this reason, along with the anticipated savings opportunity, will be a major reason for the covered entities to seek compliance.
Software developers should be aware of the goals of the HIPAA security and privacy rules, that of providing confidentiality, integrity, and availability of protected health information. PHI data must be accessible to authorized entities and persons kept private from unauthorized viewing and must be protected from unauthorized modification or deletion.
Let us audit your software for HIPAA compliance and help you to make your application HIPAA Compliant. Call Bob Mehta at Supremus Group today on (515) 865-4591 or email at Bob@HIPAAcertification.net for more details about the HIPAA compliance solutions.