On January 25th the new HIPAA Omnibus Bill was released. This bill was in essence a marriage between The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
HIPAA Omnibus is a MAJOR Game Changer in the world of Healthcare IT. Why?
- The enforcements are in place and have already begun.
- Practices are responsible for verifying their Business Associates (BA), and their BA's subcontractors, are HIPAA compliant.
- The monetary and civil penalties are substantial.
- The dependency on hosted services through EMR/EHR, Billing, Patient Management Software, will need to be migrated to a new solution if they are not HIPAA compliant.
- The practices will need to be HIPAA compliant to be part of a Health Information Exchange.
- Employees and Patients are reporting breaches to the OCR before they ever alert the practice. Not only do they get a percentage of the fine, they are also protected from any retaliation.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to HIPAA compliance. HIPAA is a
very long, thoroughly thought out process. It is a process that will change
your entire operations - the way you communicate with staff and patients, the
way you safeguard the patient data, and even who you do business with. It is
not something to be taken lightly or to sit on the shelf.
As the 25th largest IT Support Company in the World, BlueWave has a full
comprehensive set of affordable services to help practices and their
business associates get and stay compliant. This includes HIPAA Risk
Assessments, Managed Security, Managed IT, Cloud Computing, Disaster Recovery,
and Archived solutions. If you would like more information please call me, Deborah Frazier, at 678-387-5025.
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