Meet the strict HIPAA compliance with IBSSAFE Backup Service

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.

Remote data backup is the ideal subscription service to enable a covered entities to deliver mandated services for their clients. A simplified version of the Act's compliance requirements are available at http://aspe.hhs.gov/admnsimp/

Six critical questions to ask your potential provider:

1. Can you guarantee that my data will be available in the event of total hardware failure?
2. Can you guarantee the integrity of my data in the event of a catastrophic event or human error?
3. Can you absolutely guarantee the confidentiality of my data?
4. Can you guarantee my data is protected against intrusion?
5. If I grow from 2 facilities to 20, can you guarantee that my system is scalable?
6. Can you guarantee that my data is stored in a single database?

When using the online data backup service you can rest assured that the answer to all of these questions is Yes!