Secure File Sharing for Business And Understanding HIPAA
Why is secure file sharing for business and understanding HIPAA so important to your company? Businesses frequently exchange private information with outside parties. While sharing, files may disappear or be accessed by unauthorized parties. You can control your data with the secure file share offered by iSync.io. Only recipients with the necessary permissions are permitted to view or download files.
Why Is Compliance Important?
Because of the rise in the frequency of data breach incidents, there has been a rise in the number of instances of identity theft and other types of fraudulent conduct. Industry regulators have implemented
stringent laws and regulations on organizations to secure private data in response to the growing number of consumers concerned about their data’s security and privacy. HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS are only a few of the regulations that are generally acknowledged.
According to these laws, sensitive information must always be collected, exchanged, and maintained securely, and only authorized personnel should have access to the information. In addition, only authorized personnel may have access to the information.
It is up to each company to implement the appropriate security measures to maintain this data’s confidentiality. If you violate these, you could be subject to hefty fines in addition to other types of punishments.
HIPAA
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) outlines several administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of electronically stored protected health information (ePHI).
The “conduit exception” for Business Associate agreements was made more restrictive by the omnibus regulation that was issued for HIPAA. Despite this, it continues to acknowledge that certain delivery services, such as the United States Postal Service and United Parcel Service, as well as their electronic equivalents, are exempt from the Business Associate agreement requirement.
The “transient vs. persistent nature” of the service that is being provided is an important factor in determining whether or not the conduit exception is satisfied.
When it comes to consumer file-sharing programs that are now available on the market, it is vital to examine each of them thoroughly to assess their compliance with the HIPAA security requirement. To maintain HIPAA compliance during the file sharing process, it is necessary to implement additional security measures in addition to encrypting the data whenever they are either stored or transferred. Among these are:
- The conclusion of agreements between business associates (BAAs)
- Administrative controls
- Authentication with many factors
- Monitoring and management of access controls
- Audit traces as well as activity tracking for accounts
- Encryption with TLS and SSL
- Transfer of data and protection against loss
With in-motion and at-rest data encryption, remote wipe, proactive alarms, and activity logs, SyncBox offers unparalleled HIPAA, SOC-2, and GDPR compliant security.
The Precautions to Take So That You Can Remain in Compliance with HIPAA
1. Safeguards against the elements
One aspect of the physical safeguards is how your protected health information (PHI) is physically accessible. This includes taking precautions to protect any work areas, servers, workstations, or mobile devices that might have access to protected health information (PHI).
Covered businesses should, at a bare minimum:
- Limit the number of people who have direct, physical access to workplaces and devices that have access to protected health information (PHI). This also involves the utilization of other physical security measures, such as locks, alarms, ID badges, and CCTV cameras, for the safety of your physical facilities.
- Establishing a set of protocols is necessary to specify who can use these workspaces and devices and how they can be utilized.
- Establish protocols for safely deleting protected health information (PHI) on a device before its retirement from service.
2. Administrative safeguards
Policies and procedures developed specifically to secure patient information at the administrative level are included in administrative safeguards. This could involve naming a security officer, carrying out risk assessments, providing personnel training, and other similar activities.
Employees need to receive adequate training on secure file sharing for business and understanding HIPAA to recognize phishing attempts and guarantee that protected health information (PHI) is never disclosed to third parties without permission.
Establish a robust security management plan that outlines the processes for conducting risk assessments and identifies all potential hazards related to the protected health information (PHI) your organization stores. Additionally, it ought to include an incident response plan (IRP), which ought to be executed in the event that an incident involving PHI takes place.
Establish stringent access controls to guarantee that personal health information (PHI) is only made available to those who have a genuine requirement.
3. Protective measures using technology
According to the HIPAA Security Rule, “the technology and the policies and procedures for its usage that protect the electronic health information and control the access to it” defines “technical safeguards.”
In other words, they are the specific technical safeguards that must be in place to secure personally identifiable health information (PHI).
This covers the way the PHI is stored, its location, the manner in which it is accessed and shared, and authentication and encryption procedures, among other things. Use an industry-grade encryption technique to ensure that all protected health information (PHI) is securely encrypted at rest and while in transit.
This is a requirement to ensure that you have the essential safeguards. In addition, the implementation of procedures to restrict access to the decryption keys to only those authorized to do so is also included. Even if an adversary can access the data, they cannot read it due to the robust data encryption that has been implemented.
Establish the required access controls to prevent unauthorized access to protected health information (PHI). When accessing and sharing sensitive patient data, this includes associating a one-of-a-kind ID with every user and mandating the use of multi-factor authentication.
Implement auditing capabilities that comply with the requirements provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This ensures that you have a detailed and tamper-proof audit trail of all events relating to how PHI is accessed and shared and any other relevant activities that take place within your IT environment. Additionally, this brings about race of mind that your audit trail cannot be altered.
Protect the confidentiality of all PHI by ensuring that it is not misused in any way, particularly by preventing information from being altered or disposed of without the appropriate authority.
Firewall
For your server environment to be compliant with HIPAA server regulations, you are required to have a firewall that is completely deployed.
Because web applications present their unique challenges and have become such a frequent target for intrusions, server environments typically have a combination of perimeter and server-side firewalls as well as solutions specifically designed for web applications. This is because web applications have become such a frequent target for attacks.
