If you’re a HIPAA-covered entity or enterprise affiliate, you doubtless know that affected person PHI could 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 submit, you need to be sure third-party trackers like Meta Pixel aren’t accessing and disclosing knowledge behind the scenes. However widespread customer-facing instruments shouldn’t be ignored. Widespread methods through which PHI could also be collected and transmitted embrace:
- Stay Chat
- Affected person Portals
- On-line Affected person Kinds
- On-line Scheduling Instruments
- Critiques and Testimonials
- On-line loyalty Packages
The HIPAA Privateness Rule requires that entities that create, obtain, keep, and/or transmit PHI take particular measures to guard it. For instance, if your organization retains individually identifiable medical info on a server, that server should be encrypted and safe. Transmitting PHI contains sending info through e mail, textual content, net types or different sorts of digital messaging. Storing PHI contains storing info in apps, knowledge facilities, and so forth. 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 net types on the corporate web site are encrypted and safe
- Solely ship emails containing PHI by encrypted e mail servers
- Associate with hosting firms which can be HIPAA-compliant and have processes for shielding PHI
- Execute BAAs with third events which have entry to PHI (together with hosting firms)
- Be sure that PHI is simply accessible by licensed people inside your organization
