When the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was first established in 1996, it lacked the stringent penalties we see today. But in recent years, the enforcement landscape has transformed significantly. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) conducts random audits, and multi-million dollar fines are now common.
This means that no practice is immune from scrutiny, and you need a sound protection plan in place to safeguard yourself and your practice’s reputation before the “HIPAA police” come to call. Here’s how to stay compliant in 2024.
Strategies for HIPAA Preparedness
Because it’s open season for audits, a proactive approach to HIPAA compliance is non-negotiable for your medical practices. You need to have robust compliance measures in place as soon as possible—waiting until you receive an audit notice makes it all the more challenging for you or your practice (after the fact) to emerge unscathed.
Here are the top strategies we recommend to our clients:
1. Conduct a Security Assessment
The first thing the Office of Civil Rights will ask for is a security/risk assessment. This is a written document that scrutinizes how you handle protected health information (PHI) both electronically and within the practice.
2. Secure Your Electronic Devices
HIPAA compliance extends beyond IT systems to include how staff manage and interact with electronic information. This includes mobile device usage, where smartphones often store sensitive patient information. Smartphones and laptops are common points of vulnerability, with lost or stolen devices consistently ranking in the top three categories of data breaches.
One of the top categories of HIPAA breaches involves lost or stolen devices—laptops, tablets, and smartphones—containing unencrypted protected health information.
You can protect yourself and your patients by ensuring all devices are password-protected and encrypted according to HIPAA’s requirements, which follow National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards. Devices with this level of protection are generally not considered data breaches if lost or stolen, keeping you out of hot water with HIPAA. (The only issue in this case would be if patient information was stored on the missing device with no other backup, leaving a patient’s medical record incomplete.) Many devices now ship with the default encryption setting “on.” Older devices might need configuration.
3. Establish Social Media Policies
Social media is often the first (and ongoing) point of contact between the practice and a patient or member of the public. Clear guidelines on staff and patient interactions on social media platforms are vital to protect PHI, offering an opportunity to train staff and answer questions, ultimately offering a greater level of protection for the practice.
While it seems intuitive that if a patient outs themselves on social media as your patient, you should be able to respond online without breaching HIPAA. After all, the patient disclosed to the world their medical details. But that’s not how the law works. Unless the patient has provided written authorization to disclose their protected health information, you cannot even acknowledge they were your patient, much less disclose the details of their care. (Don’t kill the messenger.)
4. Proactively Manage Your Online Reputation
You should be asking your patients for online reviews. This helps to shore up your online reputation. However, HIPAA compliance is absolutely critical (and not easy) in this space.
eMerit from Medical Justice is a proprietary program that streamlines the review-building process for physicians, with a team of experts who help you manage your online reputation in a HIPAA-compliant manner.
Our HIPAA-compliant point-of-service survey tool allows practices to ask for reviews and collect them in-office. Doctors have control over when feedback is requested for the best timing for both the practice and the patient. From there, reviews are automatically posted with your patients’ authorization. We distribute unique reviews to ~10 of the best, most dominant online doctor review sites, without duplicating reviews across multiple sites.
Compliance can be daunting for smaller practices with limited resources. Unlike large institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, smaller practices need solutions tailored to their specific needs. While Medical Justice focuses on providing medico-legal tools and prevention strategies, our network of experts offers advice and referrals, including a comprehensive and easy-to-implement guide to HIPAA compliance through Medical Risk Institute, which reflects its premium value and is regularly updated to align with any changes in laws and regulations.
Medical Justice memberships also offer other protections and prevention strategies, including:
- Deterrence and early action against frivolous lawsuits
- Protection against internet defamation
- Patient conflict resolution
- Medico-legal hotline to help quickly guide you through medico-legal issues
- And more
Contact us to learn which of our services may be a good fit for you. Our medico-legal experts are here to help you navigate the complexities of HIPAA and implement the right policies so you’ll be ready if and when you receive an audit.
What do you think? How is your practice implementing HIPAA compliance?
