Why Chiropractors Need to Understand HIPAA

Understanding exactly what HIPAA Compliance is and how it impacts your Chiropractic practice is important. 

It is important for Chiropractors to realize that compliance is constantly changing. HIPAA has emerged to help chiropractors deal with modern technology and new ways of communicating. Primarily, it helps protect your patient’s private information.

What Is HIPAA?

HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and involves the protection of patient information – including privacy and security of that information.

There are two things that you need to be focused on with HIPAA – Privacy and Security. There has to be two polices in your office that address both. Every staff member also has to be trained and comply with the policies. When training new staff, you must review your HIPAA policies and make sure that all staff understands what they mean. You should also assess your HIPAA compliance regularly and review the related documents. Brown IT can assist you with HIPAA systems auditing.

If you currently do not have HIPAA Privacy or HIPAA Security in place then you are considered “non compliant”. For insurance reasons you will want to amend this immediately.

How Brown IT can assist with HIPAA Compliance

Risk Assesment

Aside from developing policies, informing your staff, and providing training – Brown IT can handle all technology auditing for HIPAA. A HIPAA security risk assessment should be conducted by unbiased professionals to ensure your organization is protected.

An IT security risk assessment can be a daunting task. Meaningful use and HIPAA require you to conduct a Risk Analysis per CFR 164.308 (a)(1)(ii)(A). But if not conducted by an information security professional, your organization can still be exposed to threats against your patients’ information. And how do you know what to do after the assessment? Brown IT uses an unbiased, quantifiable assessment process built on the NIST framework that can be easily repeated year after year. We can help with any remediation efforts including policy and procedure creation, employee training, and more.

Active Directory

HIPAA compliance is necessary in an Active Directory (AD) environment to ensure that network data is protected from any unauthorized access. Inappropriate logins and access to user accounts and files could complicate things for you. Sadly, the native tools don’t offer much in terms of drawing your attention to network security violations. Brown IT can audit these actions with custom-built system tools.