If you’re a HIPAA-covered entity or enterprise affiliate, you probably know that affected person PHI might solely be created, acquired, maintained, and transmitted as permitted by the HIPAA Safety Rule and the HIPAA Privateness Rule. But you might not have targeted in your firm’s web site as a spot the place PHI is collected and transmitted. If you’re topic to HIPAA, you need to frequently assess your web site knowledge practices. As described on this weblog put up, you need to be certain that third-party trackers like Meta Pixel usually are not accessing and disclosing knowledge behind the scenes. However frequent customer-facing instruments shouldn’t be ignored. Frequent methods wherein PHI could also be collected and transmitted embrace:
- Reside Chat
- Affected person Portals
- On-line Affected person Kinds
- On-line Scheduling Instruments
- Critiques and Testimonials
- E mail
- On-line loyalty Applications
The HIPAA Privateness Rule requires that entities that create, obtain, preserve, and/or transmit PHI take particular measures to guard it. For instance, if your organization retains individually identifiable medical data on a server, that server should be encrypted and safe. Transmitting PHI contains sending data by way of e mail, textual content, internet types or different kinds of digital messaging. Storing PHI contains storing data in apps, knowledge facilities, and so on. If your organization web site collects, shops, or transmits PHI and doesn’t take cheap measures to safe that knowledge, it could violate HIPAA.
To start remediating dangers, firms ought to:
- Buy and implement an SSL certificates for the corporate web site
- Guarantee all internet types on the corporate web site are encrypted and safe
- Solely ship emails containing PHI via encrypted e mail servers
- Companion with hosting firms which are HIPAA-compliant and have processes for safeguarding PHI
- Execute BAAs with third events which have entry to PHI (together with hosting firms)
- Make sure that PHI is just accessible by approved people inside your organization
