HIPAA

Doctors, pharmacists, medical centers, insurance companies, laboratories, and other members of the healthcare industry have become increasingly concerned with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. This act states that all healthcare providers insure the protection of patient privacy, with HIPPA compliance required by April 14th 2003. The other key provision of HIPAA is also critical: portability of information, and patient access. This will levy additional requirements on healthcare providers and may prove a major challenge due to the lack of standardization in existing systems across the industry. In fact, it is likely that these portability and interoperability issues will be the major cost factors for healthcare establishments to address HIPAA.

The increasingly critical role that information technology has played in improving the quality of medical service and reducing its support costs makes finding cost-effective solutions for HIPAA compliance necessary. It is also critical that healthcare professionals be able to protect their existing investments in computers and networks. Jade delivers a series of cost-effective solutions that can meet the requirements for ensuring HIPAA due diligence Lacking mandated standards, Jade delivers a series of protection packages to provide a solid security foundation for healthcare professionals. There are eight key requirements to meeting current HIPAA standards. Jade solutions address each of these eight key areas.

1. Contingency Plan: Organizations must have adequate safeguards for providing electronic health information in the event of an emergency. Jade's business protection package offers complete backup and recovery for all workstations in your organization. To ensure that the backup solution becomes a part of the overall organization's security policy, Jade will include a recommended backup schedule for your organization that will yield minimal data loss during downtime. This schedule can be integrated into your operational procedures for incident handling and escalation.

2 & 8. Information Access Control and Media Control: Our business protection package features at a minimum firewall technology to lock down access to your data systems and networks. Firewalls give you multiple ways to allow or prevent access. To restrict authorization of sensitive patient records to only authorized parties, Jade offers a variety of access control products. These products allow you to migrate from password security for your applications to stronger authentication techniques that are user-friendly.

3. Security Configuration Management: Rigorous control and documentation of when outpatient information may be modified/accessed is an essential component of safeguarding patient information. Healthcare organizations must document all modifications and updates made to patient records. Our business protection packages are formed from commercial products with specified version number and application keys that form a security baseline for your organization that can be rebuilt and documented under configuration control. Jade's integrity protection products are a valuable option in our business protection packages which ensure that any data or technology modifications occur in a controlled, approved method, and that an inadvertent or malicious tampering of your baseline is detected and halted.

4, 5, 6. Security Incident Procedures, Security Management Process and Termination: As referred to in requirement one, organizations should implement any security technology solutions with an overall corporate security framework, building appropriate security measures within their existing workflow process. Jade's experienced security engineers will assist our customers purchasing a business protection package in developing a formal corporate security policy including incident handling and thorough password revocation process for terminated employees.

7. Security Training: One of the largest security weaknesses in any organization is an ill-informed employee. Lack of thorough dedicated security training for the workforce will render expensive security technologies useless in an instant. Our business protection packages are accompanied with up-to-date documentation explaining the proper usage of security products. Additional consulting support may be required for your IT administration staff. Jade offers rigorous training programs as part of it's suite of IT security programs.

If you are a healthcare provider in search of HIPAA compliant solutions, let Jade's business protection packages provide a solid security foundation for your business. Contact us today for technical specifications and prices.