A Complete Online Guide to HIPAA Compliance
As leaders in healthcare data privacy and secure messaging, Brightsquid offers the most comprehensive HIPAA Compliance and Breach Prevention training and consultation.
- Prevent Common Healthcare Clinic HIPAA Breaches
- Understand Legal Use and Disclosure of PHI
HIPAA Compliance Solutions by Brightsquid
HIPAA Compliance Training for Staff
HIPAA Compliance goes beyond certifications and protocols – it’s about building a team where each person understands, recognizes, and knows how to handle PHI. The HIPAA courses you can take through Brightsquid help create an environment of patient trust and can save your clinic millions in HIPAA violation penalties.
Required and recommended elements of HIPAA training:
- Must provide an overview of HIPAA and related rules
- Must be tailored to job roles within healthcare organizations or business associates
- Must ensure that all members of the staff understand their responsibilities in protecting PHI
- Must explain patient rights and how to share PHI
- Must explain data breaches and how to recognize and prevent them
- Must review security safeguards
- Must explain the consequences of non-compliance
Who Should Take HIPAA Breach Prevention Training?
How Often Should Clinic Staff Take HIPAA Training?
- Initial training at onboarding
- Annual refresher training
- Update training when policies or regulations change
What is HIPAA?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA is a US federal law enacted in 1996 that aims to protect the rights and privacy of individuals while enabling safe health data sharing by setting up a framework for managing personal health information. HIPAA regulations apply to two main groups-,
The covered entities, which include hospitals, clinics, physicians, nurses, health insurance providers, pharmacies, dental and chiropractic offices etc.
The business associates, which comprise of all vendors and subcontractors of the covered entities that have access to PHI in support of covered entities, including medical billing companies, cloud storage providers, IT support vendors, legal and accounting firms etc.
HIPAA offers a comprehensive framework for all parties involved in the collection, storage, management, and disposal of PHI and ePHI.
Why HIPAA Compliance Matters
In a world where cybercrimes and data trading are on the rise, frameworks like HIPAA can help organizations protect themselves and their customer’ data and privacy. Healthcare data needs constant protection as it remains one of the most heavily targeted data types by hackers. Protecting patient data not only ensures that your organization avoids penalties, but also that you uphold the very foundation of the provider-patient relationship.
The cost of non-compliance is steep. Every year, US healthcare organizations are charged with heavy fines of up to millions of dollars for violating HIPAA rules. Since 2003, OCR has received over 300,000 HIPAA-related complaints, leading to billions of dollars in fines and corrective actions across healthcare organizations of all sizes.
HIPAA Compliance Best Practices for Healthcare Employers
Maintaining HIPAA Compliance as a covered entity or business associate is a continuous priority. Compliance is more than just staying clear of violations and avoiding penalties – you must create a culture of patient privacy protection, respecting patient rights and upholding their trust. Clinics, hospitals, and business associates (like billing companies, IT vendors, or cloud providers) can reduce HIPAA breach risk by adopting a practical, repeatable compliance routine.
Here’s a very basic checklist of best practices every healthcare organization and vendor should follow:
- Conduct risk assessments at least once a year to find and address any gaps in security. Document risk assessments to use as proof in any further audits.
- Manage access to ePHI with role-based permission settings and multi-factor authentication
- Train new hires in HIPAA Compliance and Breach Prevention. Conduct refresher courses for the entire team once a year
- Use HIPAA-Compliant email and secure messaging or file transfer platforms that encrypt data at rest and in transit
