Compliance with HIPAA in 2021 Insights, Understanding and Importance

What is HIPAA?

Protection of Medical Records and Personal Health Information are well ensured with the HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal law that was passed in 1996 aiming at a standardised mechanism of Healthcare Data Protection, across the globe.

HIPAA’s Importance in Today’s World

With the rising medical needs across the globe, the need for a robust healthcare CRM has also gained prominence, alongside. The humongous chunk of data that is exchanged between the patient and the healthcare entity is ethically leveraged under the HIPAA guidelines to serve humanity better. The exchange of information and data under the act is so securely bound that it forfeits unauthorized access and malpractice.

Therefore, a HIPAA compliant Healthcare CRM is preferred by medical organizations to collect and organize patient/doctor data in the safest way possible. This not only helps to protect sensitive details about an individual in an efficient and concrete manner but also allows for ample privacy and security of health information.

More so, companies that are found misusing sensitive health-oriented data (violating HIPAA guidelines) are rigorously penalized by the authorities, depending on the type of breach. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, "A HIPAA breach is, generally, an impermissible use or disclosure under the Privacy Rule that compromises the security or privacy of the protected health information."

Advantages of HIPAA Compliance

An appropriate data protection strategy framed by the healthcare fraternity induces and establishes high levels of trust between the medical body and its patients.

Once the compliance is undertaken and abided by, it even endorses the medical organization amongst the public at large. Citizens hence are significantly more drawn towards a medical fraternity associated with HIPAA than being inclined towards a non-compliant institution of HIPAA.

As stated earlier, with the surge in medical requirements and healthcare facilities, there has also been a significant rise in Healthcare Fraud, wherein the medical data was tampered with and misused for unethical and unlawful purposes. HIPAA, therefore, plays a vital role in keeping anomalies at bay by eliminating data mishaps and healthcare fraud.

HIPAA makes the Health Insurance Portability more seamless and easy i.e. a policyholder could conveniently switch, in terms of health insurance from Brand A to Brand B without any hassles. His/her medical data along with the previous policy’s accumulated benefits shall be ported as it is to the new health insurer.

Also, owing to a large number of patients everywhere, there might be times when they want to view their medical records for genuine reasons. HIPAA makes it possible to view this patient record through the CRM, on-demand. Patients can readily add, delete, revise their data as and when required.

Lastly, the act also enforces a standardized view of the healthcare data across medical bodies. So, the data of a patient dated 26th Aug 2021 will read the same at hospital A as well as hospital B and others.

Kapture + HIPAA

Kapture’s Healthcare CRM can genuinely be your friend for life. It only stores every bit of information pertaining to the patient but also takes care of the information related to the doctor/physician/caregiver and others. Each patient’s account allows for basic information and other contact details storage (individual and family), a smart reckoner/dashboard to pursue old reports, upcoming events, ongoing treatments and history, prescriptions, and others. While, in regard to the doctors, Kapture’s CRM software lets your business to map their emergency management numbers, specialties covered, patients being presently diagnosed, upcoming appointments along with their basic contact details too.

Now how do we ensure the security of the massive data being collected and stored? Well, this is where HIPAA comes into play with its promise of safeguarding the minutest information on both ends – Patient & Doctor.

Adding to HIPAA is Kapture’s compliance with the same. Kapture CRM holds the trusted security certifications and abides by the same, thereby leveraging appropriate security configuration options in all its products.