Are you HIPAA compliant?

By the end of reading this blog you should be able to:

Understand the HIPAA security standards
Compare the current requirements with your organisations security
Learn how Cristie Software’s Bare Machine Recovery (BMR) solutions will help you become HIPAA compliant and avoid HITECH penalties

HIPAA Regulations

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was formed in 1996 to protect the confidentiality of patients personal medical information and applies to any health care provider, health plan or clearinghouse (collectively ‘covered entities’) that electronically maintains or transmits patient health information. Following this, in 2009 the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) was formed which implemented stricter penalties for HIPAA violations and expanded the covered entities to include business associates of medical offices.

Within the HIPAA regulations, covered entities must ensure they have in place:

a Data Backup Plan – establish and implement procedures to create and maintain retrievable exact copies of electronic protected health information
a Disaster Recovery Plan – establish and implement procedures to restore any loss of data
an Emergency Mode Operation plan - establish and implement procedures to enable business continuity in relation to the processes for protection of the security of electronic protected health information while operating in emergency mode

HITECH Penalties

The enforcement rules have toughened up considerably and businesses which do not meet the requirements will face direct liability for violations. The HITECH penalties for not being HIPAA compliant include:

up to $250,000 for wilful neglect
up to $1.5 million for repeat/uncorrected violations
$50,000-$250,000 and 1-10 years in prison for criminal violations
Loss of customers and business partners who refrain from working with companies who do not sufficiently safeguard their electronic protected health information
Negative publicity and legal liabilities

If you haven’t yet planned for a worst case scenario, act now to establish the critical processes. For the seven simple steps to create a successful disaster recovery plan follow this link. The following section will help you develop a clear understanding of how Cristie Software BMR can help you achieve HIPAA compliancy.

HIPAA Compliance and Cristie Software’s BMR

Cristie Software’s BMR solutions can support businesses in meeting HIPAA requirements by:

Enabling the rapid recovery of multiple critical servers to an identical state within minutes and simultaneously, meaning a whole data centre can be recovered within a few hours after a crisis takes place. This is also ideal for helping you to achieve your recovery SLA’s.
Providing compressed backups increase the amount of free space on your storage infrastructure to aid the speed of recovery.
Encrypted backups will ensure that the electronic protected health information on your systems is highly secured and never accessible without the user’s encryption key whicheliminates the threat of unauthorized access.
The recovery simulator software add-on will carry out periodic tests of the backup and recovery process so that you can guarantee your disaster recovery and business continuity plans are error free in preparation for any crisis to occur.
The backup process and file recovery process can be completely automated, eliminating the need for manual data handling. Backups will automatically occur according to the specific schedule that the user sets in place. Backups can also be initiated by the user at any time.
Restoring files can be accomplished by simple disk selection. The data will then be downloaded to the user's computer, decrypted, and then restored to their original location, or to dissimilar hardware. A password is required to restore any files, thus, preventing unauthorized restores, as per the HIPAA Security Rule.

Cristie Software’s BMR solutions are the ideal solution for fully automated backups, optimum data security and regularly testing your BMR to give you complete peace of mind.

Get on the path toward HIPAA compliance today by contacting our sales team on: