What is a HIPAA Certification and Why your EHR Implementation Partner should have it?

The regulations and legal environment in the health industry of the United States and Puerto Rico can be overwhelming- for hospitals, healthcare staff, and even for organizations doing technology implementations. The level gets complicated with the number of laws to understand, metrics to report, forms to fill, and processes to create that help the entity to be in compliance.

This time we are focusing on HIPAA regulation.

To help healthcare organizations to comply with this regulation, there are numerous companies that offer HIPAA Certifications. Even though this certification helps the healthcare organization, it is not a requirement stipulation from HIPAA.

“There is no standard or implementation specification that requires a covered entity to “certify” compliance. The evaluation standard § 164.308(a)(8) requires covered entities to perform a periodic technical and non-technical evaluation that establishes the extent to which an entity’s security policies and procedures meet the security requirements.”- stated on FAQ from HHS.gov

Types of HIPAA Certification

There are different levels of HIPAA Certification depending on the organizations’ needs to understand the regulation and the role in data maintenance.

What the Certified HIPAA Professional (CHP) learns?

The Certified HIPAA Professional (CHP) gets a training where they can better understand the HIPAA’s Administrative Simplification Act and how to create a framework for initiating and working towards a blueprint for HIPAA compliance.

This certification has broad applications and anyone from healthcare providers to administrative staff, executives, supervisors, and IT security staff could make good use of it.

One of the HIMSS Approved Education Partner, Ecfirst, offers this certification and explains the learnings as follows:

·         Understand why HIPAA requirements will cause significant changes in policies, procedures & processes within the organization in the handling of patient records.

·         Examine how implementing HIPAA will affect the way healthcare entities organize and staff to achieve and monitor compliance with patient privacy/confidentiality needs.

·         Step through qualifications and positioning strategies for a Privacy Officer & requirements for an Information Security Officer.

·         Learn why HIPAA compliance is better focused as a business issue than as an IT issue, although IT will play a major role in implementing compliant systems.

·         Review specific requirements and implementation features within each security category.

Why is HIPAA Training important in your organization and in your technology implementation company?

As you might already know, HIPAA regulation is complex, and training is a great way to help unveil the requirements into more actionable tasks and processes to keep the organization compliant. Apart from that, the violation of this regulation has very high fines and will put the organization in continuous audits from this.

HIPPA Violations can be done from simple faults:

Since the staff has patient data availability, one simple error like leaving the computer opened with the patient information or sending the patient's information through a non-company email can be a breach of security.

The HIPAA Compliance Organization says the following: “In fact, you will find that HIPAA should be a high priority, because the 2010 HITECH Regulations have applied sanctions of up to $1.5 million if your business is willfully negligent in its handling of health records.”

These daily actions can be reduced with good training and a blueprint of processes that help contain the data.

Working with a technology implementation partner with the CHP certification will help you assess the processes that have in place right now and construct a better blueprint to reduce any HIPAA violations with the new software.

Data Security- Digital Patient data is more vulnerable than ever:

With the digital evolution in the health industry, all patient information is very vulnerable, which increases the risk of a data breach. For this reason, the organization’s cyber-security system has to be strong and well in place.

Your local team should understand how to put this system and maintain it. But with a technology software implementation partner that has a CHP certification can help you optimize your processes to improve your data's safety.

In general, as the HIPAA Compliance Organization says referring to have HIPAA Certification personnel and providers, “Had you done none of this then you would be liable to be hit hard, but having done so then a serious non-compliance might just be regarded as human error rather than endemic management failure to implement HIPAA properly.”

Trinexus is part of those entities that encourage the staff to have HIPAA Professional Certification and have certified staff.