How to Develop HIPAA Compliance Software
The developers of software for medical use must comply with regulations of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The law was passed to protect sensitive health information that patients might not wish to share with the public. If you’re employed by or run a medical-related business you are aware the existence of HIPAA, but when you break the privacy regulations of HIPAA by committing security breaches, serious problems could be triggered. In just the past year there were millions of dollars of penalties were handed out in response to breaches like these. If your business also broadcasts videos live from patients’ psychotherapy sessions on its site for products, this could be an instance of how your company is at risk of legal action and customer complaints for violating this law. There are six essential steps for developing HIPAA compliance software :
1. Transport encryption
All Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) should be secured prior to being sent. The HIPAA-compliant software ensures that confidential health information is secure. It helps while transmitting and the first step being to protect your SSL by using HTTPS along with internal protocols. When hosting your private or public cloud server Your cloud provider should permit the installation of SSL to guarantee strong encryption methods in line with the HIPAA-compliant server guidelines. The latter protects websites that contain health information, and login pages. Be sure to avoid alternative non-secure version of those pages.
2. Security and backup encryption
Take the precaution of backing up crucial files regularly on a regular basis. It help in storing them locally on media that is attached to it or on a reliable remote storage. If you do this you won’t need to take much time away from your daily routine If something happens to your files, like the system on which they are stored is damaged or destroyed, you company will be safe because the data isn’t lost and can be recovered when it is needed. Make sure that you are aware of the possibility that someone could take advantage of a vulnerability inside (such for example, employees) you should ensure that you are protected from leaks of information by making sure that the you have encryption activated for any sensitive PHI that is being processed in the software system utilized.
3. Access management and identity management
To adhere to the guidelines of HIPAA To comply with HIPAA. You must be attentive and ensure the identity management policy are in place. One method to secure the data of your institution is to ensure that user IDs and passwords are exclusive to the individual and are not shared with other employees. This is the way to ensure that nobody other than employees of your health care institution has access to your personal data! To ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive information Two Factor Authentication has to be utilized, employing various methods of verification to verify the identity of an individual.
4. Integrity
It is essential to ensure that the data you gather, store and transmit is secured. If it is altered or damaged in any way that is undesirable whether intentionally or not. The initial step is to ensure that your system is able immediately identify any data manipulation that is not authorized even if only one aspect has changed. For HIPAA compliance with developing software this can be achieved by signing digitally and verifiying every single piece of information stored or transmitted within the system by using methods like PGP, SSL, etc. Then, the whole system needs to be built and designed so that it is able to block any unauthorised access to the information.
The above-mentioned measures such as regular backup and security encryption and access authorisation using appropriate user roles and privileges and also the restriction access to physical infrastructure, are an important element in making your HIPAA compliance software .
5. Disposal
Backups and archived data is required to be disposed of after a certain time and deleted. This is also the case for all decryption keys. It should be considered that any location from which data is sent could be creating backups or copies of the data. When you stop using servers the data needs to be removed from the server as well in order to ensure health security of data in addition to HIPAA compliance.
6. A Business Associate Agreement
The last aspect of HIPAA-compliant application development is that ePHI must be stored in right place. The servers of the company that has an Business Associate Agreement is signed. In other cases, it should be stored on secured internal servers. Many hosting providers are not aware of HIPAA. They may not be prepared to take any risk by accepting this agreement, which could conflict with their own procedures for business, check out the services from Mindbowser that helps with custom development software.