HIPAA Compliance: A Crucial Checklist for Mobile Healthcare Apps
HIPAA compliance is quite important if you are creating a mobile app for the healthcare sector. HIPAA infractions can put you in legal hot water, sour relations for your business, and worry patients whose data was released.
Approved in 1996, HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act) aims to maintain private access to sensitive medical records. HIPAA has evolved to incorporate several rules about cybersecurity in recent years as more and more health records have become either totally or partially electronic.
The following is a quick checklist of how to ensure your application complies with present rules and regulations.
Learn From Yourself
First, you should get basic history on HIPAA compliance to be sure you follow the law. Let us review some key phrases you should be familiar with to get you going.
Coverable Entities and Business Associates
Health plans, health clearinghouses, and healthcare providers who electronically provide health data are among the covered entities—that is, those legally obligated to follow HIPAA. Anyone who stores, maintains, gathers, or distributes data on behalf of covered businesses is regarded as a business associate and must hence follow HIPAA and present a business associate agreement (BAA).
Stated differently, you are virtually likely subject to HIPAA rules if your application is processing any sort of medical record.
Accessible here, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offers a helpful tool indicating whether rules apply to your company and application. Confirm HIPAA compliance always with this tool. HIPAA is legally complex; the checklist below is not conclusive. Rules differ widely based on your sector, the data you are working with, and so on.
PHI, or Protected Health Information
All told, this is essentially any information about payment for or access to healthcare. Still, this covers more kinds of material than you might think.
PHI has eighteen PHI identifiers:
- Names
- Dates
- Phone calls
- Geographical data
- FAX figures
- Social Security codes
- Emails
- Numbers of medical records
- Number of beneficiaries in a health plan
- Numbers for certificates and licenses
- Serial numbers and vehicle identity
- URL on the Web
- Serial numbers and device codes
- Online protocols handle
- Complete facial pictures and/or related photographs
- Biometric fingerprints, or biometric IDs
- Any unusual codes or identification numbers? For instance, PHI would apply if a hospital mandates PINs for check-in and out of a hospital.
Verify All Appropriate Safety Measures Are Set Up
Originally suggested in 1998, the HIPAA Security Rule—which affects any company or person having access to PHI—became required in 2006. This covers suppliers of IT and software. HIPAA mandates technological, administrative, and physical protections in place to defend illegal access should your mobile application retain PHI.
Technical Defenses
HIPAA calls for technical precautions including:
- Not only must you have centrally controlled user names and PINs for every authorized user, but you also have policies in place on PHI disclosure during a health emergency.
- When someone tries to access electronic health records including PHI, activity logs and audit controls create technical protections.
- Additionally advised is the introduction of a system to validate PHI verifying if illegal users have accessed, altered, or destroyed health records.
Administrative Correctives
HIPAA mandates administrative protections including:
- Your security officer should routinely undertake a risk assessment to find any possible weak points where PHI is being accessed and kept and to decide how to strengthen security.
- This policy would establish procedures for when and how to conduct a risk analysis and include systems to document and fix hazards. Policies for staff members who violate HIPAA should also exist for discipline.
- This guarantees that, should an emergency strike, you will still be able to carry out important business forecasts and calls for a strategy to maintain PHI safe in emergency mode.
- PHI cannot be accessed by unapproved parent companies, staff members, or contractors. You should also have any business associates with PHI access signing Business Associate Agreements.
- Apart from implementing the necessary administrative controls, you should routinely check your backup strategy and follow rigorous procedures for disclosing security events.
Physical Measures of Protection
HIPAA mandates for physical security:
- Policies For The Use And Positioning Of Work Stations: You must have rigorous rules in place limiting use of any workstation having PHI access. Indicate whatever physical security measures are in place at these workstations and how they can and cannot be utilized.
- Policies and procedures for mobile devices must be in place addressing how PHI is accessed and how that information will be deleted from a device should employees access PHI from mobile devices. Should a device be sold, re-used, and so on, policies and procedures must also apply.
- Further advised are facility access restrictions. From software engineers to cleaning personnel, these restrict who has physical access to sites housing PHI.
Using HIPAA Compliant Web Forms: Encryption
To be HIPAA compliant, any form used for information collecting—medical insurance forms, patient information forms—must be encrypted whether a patient or client fills it out. To ensure that such forms are only sent to HIPAA-compliant servers, you also need to make sure your website is housed by a company knowledgeable of HIPAA compliance.
Recall that any data including one of PHI’s eighteen qualifiers has to be encrypted. Always act with extra care. HIPAA compliant even if a patient is completing a basic form about on-site parking could include PHI identities and should so be HIPAA compliant.
Safeguard Your Work
We have addressed this somewhat above in relation to appropriate safety precautions. Simply said, you want to be absolutely sure your application is safe and that unauthorized users or cybercriminals cannot access PHI.
We advise:
- Local Session Timeout: Your application will cause re-authentication following specified inactive periods. This protection guarantees that an unauthorized user cannot access the data in your application should a user inadvertently leave themself signed in.
- Unauthorized users and anybody other than the patient can readily view push alerts pertaining to PHI. Should you use push notifications for your application, they should only notify your patient either they have a message in their patient portal or they indicate modifications to the application.
- An SSL Certificate with robustness: Considered the industry standard for data movement between servers and web browsers is Security Sockets Layer (SSL). SSL guarantees end-to-end encryption of data, therefore shielding PHI and other private patient information from access by other parties.
Verify Your Safety
Before releasing your application to guarantee no vulnerabilities, both dynamic and static testing are absolutely vital. Every single update should also be followed by running these tests. You should definitely get a third party to undertake a penetration test as well.
HIPAA compliance depends on your routinely validating your security. Should an undetectable weakness cause a security breach, your business may suffer legal consequences.
Get An Expert’s Final Greenlight
You have done your due diligence and believe you have followed every single HIPAA rule with great care. Congrats. To be sure your application satisfies all HIPAA legal criteria, though, you should always acquire confirmation from an experienced third-party consultant and/or attorney.
HIPAA is complex as we discussed before, and what qualifies as compliance differs widely between applications. Even the most attentive programmers could unintentionally ignore a security flaw or forget a step. This is why guaranteeing compliance depends on impartial third party evaluation.
Conclusion :
Though it requires a lot of effort, HIPAA compliance is very essential for any application managing medical data. Compliance not only shields your business from fines but also is just the correct behavior. Regarding their medical history, everyone has a right to privacy; HIPAA was created to protect private information from view-point
