Reach HIPAA compliance with ByteWize Online Backup Services

Professional backup services can help medical services practitioners reach HIPAA compliance for secure off-site storage of electronic records and opens path for expanding ones services to become expert in contingency planning.

HIPAA background
In 1996, Congress enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The legislative goals of HIPAA were to mandate the industry to implement procedures to reduce the administrative costs of healthcare, develop standard transactions for consistency in the industry, promote security and confidentiality of patient records and to provide incentive for the healthcare industry to use electronic communications to make patient records available no matter where the patient was being treated - a process that takes days with manual records - and particularly useful in emergencies. All health care providers, insurance providers, health care clearinghouses or health plans that electronically maintains or transmits health information pertaining to an individual must comply with HIPAA regulations. Failure to comply with the Act's requirements originally had some onerous penalties for disclosure of any element of medical information to sources without need, such as a clerk inadvertently faxing some record to the wrong fax number, would have had both financial and incarceration involved. These penalties have been reduced by interpretation by the Secretary of HHS, who was chartered by the Act to develop the compliance guidelines. The Act, as passed by Congress, set 1998 as the start date for compliance, but the pace with which the Federal Bureaucracy operates has delayed the start date to 2005. All in the healthcare industry are now preparing to comply with the Act.

HIPAA Contingency Planning
By working with a professional data backup service provider, such as ByteWize, a medical practice or medical information chain participant has a chance to become in compliance with HIPAA. Services that can support specific areas of contingency planning and compliance, include:

• Off-site Data backup plan
  
• Disaster recovery plan
  
• Application and data criticality assessment
  
• Emergency operations plan
  
• Procedures for above in place