If you’re a HIPAA-covered entity or enterprise affiliate, you probably know that affected person PHI might solely be created, acquired, 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, it’s best to frequently assess your web site information practices. As described on this weblog publish, it’s best to be sure third-party trackers like Meta Pixel usually are not accessing and disclosing information behind the scenes. However widespread customer-facing instruments shouldn’t be ignored. Widespread methods by which PHI could also be collected and transmitted embrace:
- Reside Chat
- Affected person Portals
- On-line Affected person Types
- On-line Scheduling Instruments
- Critiques and Testimonials
- 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 should be encrypted and safe. Transmitting PHI consists of sending data by way of electronic mail, textual content, net varieties or different forms of digital messaging. Storing PHI consists of storing data in apps, information facilities, and many others. If your organization web site collects, shops, or transmits PHI and doesn’t take affordable measures to safe that information, it might violate HIPAA.
To start remediating dangers, firms ought to:
- Buy and implement an SSL certificates for the corporate web site
- Guarantee all net varieties on the corporate web site are encrypted and safe
- Solely ship emails containing PHI by means of encrypted electronic mail servers
- Accomplice with internet hosting firms which are HIPAA-compliant and have processes for shielding PHI
- Execute BAAs with third events which have entry to PHI (together with internet hosting firms)
- Be sure that PHI is simply accessible by licensed people inside your organization
