How do I become HIPAA compliant?

Even though there aren’t any one-size-fits-all compliance checklist, here are some basic HIPAA compliance requirements:

Review your policies and procedures
Organizations must develop and implement policies that best reflect the regulatory standards as outlined in the HIPAA Rules. Policies and procedures must also be reviewed and regularly updated to account for the changes made by the OCR and ensure that the external stakeholders and patients are aware of these changes. To make things easier our robust cloud-based software, HIPAA Ready, allows users to easily update their policies and share across the organization.

Employee training
All employees are required to go through HIPAA training. Besides mandatory annual HIPAA training, conducting training regularly helps employees sharpen their understanding of the HIPAA law and lowers the risk of inadvertently violating the standards. With our software, authorized users can add HIPAA training courses, assign a trainee, and set a training schedule to make training management simpler.

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Performing internal audits and risk assessments
Covered entities and business associates must conduct internal audits and risk assessments regularly to assess administrative, technical, and physical gaps with regards to HIPAA Privacy and Security standards. With HIPAAReady, organizations can perform these tasks regularly in a matter of a few clicks. The objective of this is to identify any potential threats to the integrity of PHI and resolve the issues as soon as possible.

Corrective actions
Once the threats and vulnerabilities have been identified after self-audits and risk assessments, covered entities and business associates must take corrective actions or make remedy plans to reverse compliance violations. These actions must be well-documented with corresponding dates, including dates on which the gaps will be corrected.

Business Associate Agreements
Covered entities and business associates must execute business associate agreements with all the vendors who may transmit, create, receive, or maintain PHI on their behalf. These agreements must be annually reviewed and updated to account for the changes to the nature of their practice or organizational relationships. Before any PHI is shared, BAAs must be executed.

Incident management
As per the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, covered entities and business associates must have proper incident management procedures in case a PHI breach occurs. The breach must be documented and the patients must be notified about their PHI being compromised.

Documentation
The most important aspect of HIPAA compliance requirements is documentation. Auditors may ask for hundreds of documents during an investigation, such as facility blueprints, organizational workflow charts, password policies, training logs, work desk procedures, and more. Easily maintain all the required documents using our software to reduce the hassle of finding these documents at the last minute before an official audit

This is just a baseline of what a compliance program should look like. To learn about HIPAA Technical and Administrative Safeguards, click the links below:

• HIPAA Technical Safeguards
• HIPAA Administrative Safeguards

Implementing all these specifications can be time-consuming and arduous. This is why we recommend organizations to use HIPAA Ready to streamline their compliance efforts.

Source:

HIPAA Compliance Requirements – Everything You Need To Know