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5 Ways to make your mobile app HIPAA Compliance

Author: Alisha Porter
by Alisha Porter
Posted: Jun 07, 2020

In today’s time of technology, there may be a massive wide variety of online healthcare applications available in the digital market but what about the safety of the patient's data?

The safety of patient information is more influential than ever before. Develop the apps HIPPA compliance is required for the safety of the sensitive data.

What is HIPPA?

Hippa (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) covers managing privacy and safety requests for "Covered Entities" and their "Business Associates" who've to manage the data privacy solutions of the medical data and protected health records of the person.

According to the Health and Human Service (HHS) department safety of health information is essential and as per the rules, it sets security standards for the safety of the patient's health details that are contained or transferred in electronic form.

Why is HIPPA Compliance mobile app required?

To make portable devices protecting secured information especially when portable devices can be stolen or lost and sometimes facing the virus and threat attacks. Many times devices use unsecured Wi-Fi connections that increase the risk of leakage of the private details by social media or email. So it's essential to implement security features that make a mobile app to protect from unapproved sharing of protected health information.

The HIPPA security law needs relevant administrative, technical and physical protection that is required to acquire confidential details and for the security of the electronically transmitted protected health information. It's important to update the storage, records and sending of the Protected Health Information(PHI) to be HIPPA compliant.

If you are developing apps related to healthcare than keeping the protected health information protected is a must so you have to focus on some key points to be cover in an app to keep personal health details protected.

You have to limit the storage of the PHI by giving access controls such as who can view or who can edit the confidential details. According to the HIPPA rule, patients have the right to view their personal details and give access to the doctors or pharmacists.

Nobody else can view or modify the patient's sensitive data. Assigning role-based access control is an effective way to fulfill this requirement. For example, assigning rights to various groups depending on their statuses such as lab technicians, physicians, and etc.

Work on a required authentication of the specific person to view or modify the sensitive data. There are many ways to authenticate the user such as biometric access, password protection, personal identification number(PIN) or many more.

Consider two-factor authentication for the security of protected health information. Make sense to allow authorized users in case of any emergency. Focus on safety while transferring the protected health information.

Follow HTTPS for all communications. Use secure communication protocols such as Ssl or TSL. It's essential to enable an SSL certificate for your app from trusted providers and ensure to use secure SSH and FTPS protocols to send protected health information.

Encryption is the most effective way to secure protected health information. Unencrypted data on the various devices are the easy and common source of the HIPPA breaches.

Encryption and decryption is the most secure way so it's important to add this feature in your app. Maintain the log reports that contain the information of the users such as when user logins, what user did with the data like view, modify or delete, details OS when the user get login and logout, number of the authentication failures, timeout of the session and what other activities are done in your app and with the protected health information.

However, it's important to develop user-friendly mobile apps with strong security that allows users and administrators to use the details. Some safeguards such as password protection, automatic logoff and etc are easy to implement but for other complex implementation, it's essential to work with data security experts in HIPPA compliance for your mobile app development.

About the Author

Alisha Porter is the data security & cloud computing manager at Layer One Networks. Layer One Networks is the premier IT consulting firm in Corpus Christi, Texas.

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  • Guest  -  4 years ago

    Amazing information about mobile app security, Thanks for sharing such a informative content.

Author: Alisha Porter

Alisha Porter

Member since: May 13, 2020
Published articles: 4

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