Tips to Pass a HIPAA Risk Analysis Assessment

Posted by johnm0307 on October 8th, 2014

The Administrative Simplification Provisions better known as the Health Insurance Portability and Affordability Act (HIPAA) actually requires medical practices to follow a proper set of national standards for better experience in healthcare transactions in order to assign identifiers for certain health insurance plans, employers or providers. 

Additionally, all the requirements for meaningful usage states that all your practices must actually review or conduct a proper security risk analysis and successfully implementing all your security updates as necessary and correct identified security deficiencies as a major part of the entire risk management process. For all those who are oblivion to the fact must understand that HIPAA risk analysis is an important part for your business and thus it’s imperative to meet all the requirements and practices. One should actually conduct proper periodic risk assessments in order to prove and understand that they are HIPAA-compliant.

How exactly do we Define HIPAA Risk Assessment?

A proper HIPAA risk analysis is certainly one imperative process for it helps ensure businesses are willfully following national standards at its best. It actually involves taking a good look at your overall practice as per the certain information technology standards. Moreover, as a part of assessment, a person needs to be working in an office who is typically a practice manager or maybe a  physician and is supposedly designated to work as the HIPAA security officer.

Here’s a list of guidelines and rules one needs to understand when actually preparing to go for risk assessment are as below:

• Make sure you follow proper HIPAA guidelines and rules.
• Ensure you keep a check on all your medical records and lock them in your safe and let authorized personnel to have a proper access to them.
• Make sure you give some time to install proper antivirus and firewall software on all the possible laptops, tablets and any possible internal network. 
• Ensure you destroy all the papers that are no longer required to be digitalized or are properly discarded. 
• Ensure that your system doesn’t face the reception room or any direction within the certain view of unauthorized personnel.
• Additionally, one should ensure that all the password locks are used when staff is away from you.
• Never use social security numbers as your unique patient identifiers.
• Keep all your portable hardware which contains data secure is locked when not in use.
• Keep your hardwares including servers in proper clean environment with minimum or no access by unauthorized person 

Ensure you take just the right steps and safeguard your security from any possible threats in future.

Visit here to know HIPAA Security Policies.