If you’re a HIPAA-covered entity or enterprise affiliate, you probably know that affected person PHI could solely be created, obtained, 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 information practices. As described on this weblog publish, you need to make sure that third-party trackers like Meta Pixel usually are not accessing and disclosing information behind the scenes. However frequent customer-facing instruments shouldn’t be missed. Frequent methods during which PHI could also be collected and transmitted embrace:
- Stay Chat
- Affected person Portals
- On-line Affected person Varieties
- On-line Scheduling Instruments
- Critiques and Testimonials
- E mail
- On-line loyalty Packages
The HIPAA Privateness Rule requires that entities that create, obtain, preserve, and/or transmit PHI take particular measures to guard it. For instance, if your organization retains individually identifiable medical data on a server, that server have to be encrypted and safe. Transmitting PHI consists of sending data through electronic mail, textual content, internet varieties or different kinds of digital messaging. Storing PHI consists of storing data in apps, information facilities, and so forth. If your organization web site collects, shops, or transmits PHI and doesn’t take cheap measures to safe that information, it could violate HIPAA.
To start remediating dangers, corporations ought to:
- Buy and implement an SSL certificates for the corporate web site
- Guarantee all internet varieties on the corporate web site are encrypted and safe
- Solely ship emails containing PHI via encrypted electronic mail servers
- Accomplice with hosting corporations which might be HIPAA-compliant and have processes for safeguarding PHI
- Execute BAAs with third events which have entry to PHI (together with hosting corporations)
- Be certain that PHI is barely accessible by approved people inside your organization
