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Saturday, June 1, 2019

The Qualities Of The Best HIPAA Management Solutions

By Diane Foster


HIPAA is a set of rules which ensure that patient health information is available and secure. Failing to comply with these rules could lead to lawsuits and hefty fines that ruin the reputation of a company. If you work in the healthcare industry or in an organization that has access to healthcare data, you need innovative HIPAA management solutions to guarantee compliance.

One thing HIPAA is designed to do is safeguard patients and their confidentiality. Identity thieves highly seek after personal healthcare information, and as they find deceptive methods of stealing huge amounts of data, it is vital to implement effective privacy and security measures to keep the data safe. You can use software that has user authentication to prevent unauthorized persons from accessing private information.

Ensuring that your software has self-audits is also important. HIPAA rules stipulate several audits that healthcare organizations need to execute. The audits identify risk areas by spanning the privacy and security infrastructure of an institution. With good software, it is possible to use these audits to get a complete picture showing the compliance of your institution. The audits can act as a guide as you create a compliance plan. It is better to use self-audits rather than to hire a consultant to give you the required data since they are cost effective.

Another important feature is documentation. Federal regulation mandates this feature, and it is also vital to prove that you have taken the right steps towards becoming compliant. Documentation is one of the main benefits of adopting compliance software in your organization.

It is vital for the software to build the plan of an organization and document the process as the years go by so that it can be prepared for an audit. The best software can provide doctors, dentists and other health care professionals with comprehensive and accurate documentation. Such documentation can minimize delayed or denied payments, reduce workflow burden, and ensure that patients access high quality care.

It is also important to ensure that the solutions you select have remediation plans. Self audits will display the deficiencies you have in your HIPAA compliance. Handling these deficiencies will create the foundation of remediation plans, which should stipulate how you are intending to handle non-compliance issues. Good software should enable you to create remediation plans and execute them with ease. The data in your self-audit can help you create remediation plans to deal with the deficiencies you expose.

When you identify gaps in your organization and remedy them, you need a tool that can prevent them from becoming recurring areas of risk. That is where procedures and policies come into the picture. Your software needs to have a means of creating procedures and policies you may implement in your organization. These often come in the form of basic templates you can fill in and adapt to the needs of your organization.

To comply with HIPAA regulations, you also need to manage your relationship with business associates well. These are the organizations you may have hired to handle protected health information (PHI). Your software should enable you to track and manage our relationships with these organizations, including executing business associate agreements. The right management solutions can minimize the risk of breaches and penalties.




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