The Role of HIPAA Security Rule
The HIPAA security rule is a large set of security standards that businesses must follow to ensure that ePHI data is collected, stored, and transmitted safely. Demonstrating compliance with this rule will also help an organization secure its perimeters against common cyber threats.
Especially considering the high value of healthcare information and sensitive patient data, cybercriminals routinely target businesses in this sector. The HIPAA security rule aims to protect these companies, ensuring they have preventative cybersecurity structures in place to keep them safe and guard their patients’ sensitive data.
Why Is the HIPAA Security Rule Important?
There are a number of reasons why the HIPAA security rule is so effective.
- Protects Patient Information: The HIPAA security rule helps to ensure that a patient’s data and any privacy information connected to their health records is kept private. This extends to personal information like their name and social security number.
- Decreases Threat Risks: Part of the HIPAA security rule involves regularly auditing internal cybersecurity measures, which can help to identify vulnerabilities ahead of time and neutralize them. This preventative approach reduces the likelihood of an unknown vulnerability leading to a data breach.
- Enhances Physical Infrastructure: While the majority of the HIPAA security rule regulations focus on cyber defenses, some physical elements are also included. These ensure secure facility access to certain locations within organizations and other access controls to prevent an unknown person from walking into a hospital and accessing something they shouldn’t.
5 Sections of the HIPAA Security Rule
There are five sections to the HIPAA security rule: general rules, risk analysis and management, administrative safeguards, physical safeguards, and technical safeguards:
- General rules: These aim to regulate how entities ensure the confidentiality and availability of ePHI, protect against known threats, and ensure compliance in the workforce.
- Risk Analysis: It extends general rules by regularly auditing the network to find potential vulnerabilities, and fixing them.
- Administrative Safeguards: These elements focus on the workforce, the process of security management, the development of contingency plans, and security awareness training for all employees within an organization.
- Physical Safeguards: Physical safeguards refer to any changes to the site infrastructure of an office or healthcare facility to protect it from external forces. These would include facility access control badges, policies around who can be in what areas, and device controls to prevent employees from taking private records home.
- Technical Safeguards: Finally, technical safeguards refer to any cybersecurity defenses that a company needs to implement, any processes to ensure device or personnel verification, and specific controls to ensure encryption and protection on data at transmission and in storage.
Data Protected Under HIPAA
HIPAA in its entirety is an extended form of regulation that seeks to protect health care data and any personal information that is linked to medical records.
It also has the secondary function of helping individuals to have more control over their data, including:
Everything from medical records and billing information to specific lab results and patient communication data is protected under HIPAA. More specifically, there are 18 identifiers that all fall under HIPAA that represent the total breadth of information that is technically EPHI and must be protected by businesses.
These include information like:
- Names
- Geographical areas
- Year of birth
- Phone numbers
- Social security numbers
- Medical record numbers
- Health plan details
- Full-face photographic images
- Biometric information
- Account numbers
How to Implement HIPAA Security Rule
A business looking to implement the HIPAA security rule into their organization should take care to follow specific guidance for their organization. Some businesses will have specific requirements, especially if they handle uncommon or unusual health data.
However, the vast majority of companies can follow the steps below:
- Conduct an Assessment: Read through the HIPAA security rule criteria and then use this as a framework to audit your current security defenses.
- Identify Missing Policies: Based on the results of your audit, look for specific areas that you are failing to comply with on the HIPAA security practice and make a note of them.
- Introduce New Technologies: Introduce any technologies that your business lacks and implement new policies to cover the areas that you previously needed to fulfill.
- Offer Mandatory Training: Employees are often the weak link in cybersecurity networks, as one small mistake can convert into a major security breach. Regular training will reduce the likelihood of this occurring.
- Create an Incident Response Plan: Incident planning allows businesses to develop contingency plans that they can then use if anything were to go wrong. These shorten average response time and help to keep businesses safe.
- Audit Regularly: Finally, businesses should regularly audit their policies, cybersecurity defenses, and networks to ensure everything is updated to the most recent patch and working correctly.
How Check Point Supports HIPAA Security Rule Compliance
Compliance, especially when it comes to a high-risk industry like healthcare, is absolutely vital. With the price of customer data continuously increasing, the risk to businesses is growing every single year. By following leading cybersecurity practices and implementing regulations like a HIPAA security rule, your business can keep itself safe.
Check Point offers a streamlined method of ensuring compliance through Quantum. Your business can rapidly perform audits, monitor policy changes in real time to avoid human errors, and instantly receive a list of potential improvements you could make to your compliance strategies.
Protect your business today and ensure regulation by requesting a demo.
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