In healthcare, the ability to easily access patient information is just as important as making sure it's secure. In order to scale your healthcare business and stay audit-ready you'll need to know how to do both.
Answer these 4 questions to ensure your staff has everything they need to securely view, share, and discuss sensitive patient information when they need it most.
Is my data encrypted?
HIPAA requires that covered entities implement a "mechanism to encrypt and decrypt electronic protected health information"1 or an equivalent solution. Solutions should protect stored data as well as data being transmitted between necessary parties. If you don't know if your data is sufficiently encrypted, you should- ask the vendor!
Do I have policies in place to prevent data breaches?
We hear about healthcare data breaches all too often. While technical safeguards can ensure the security of patient information, your team must be aware of best practices for further protecting and distributing it. Develop a formal policy for accessing, sending, and storing all patient-related data.
The tools you use should have the ablility to track each user that views, modifies, or transmits a document.
Is information easy to find within my secure solutions?
While advanced technical safeguards are absolutely necessary when it comes to storing patient documentation and communicating securely, that information must also be readily available to the caregivers and office staff that need it most. Forcura uses Elasticsearch to ensure that all information stored in our secure platform can be easily located by any user at any time.
Source: https://www.elastic.co/videos/forcura-setting-a-new-healthcare-paradigm-with-elasticsearch
Is my data accessible from any device?
Mobility is vital to providing timely and efficient care. Make sure that technical safeguards are agile enough to allow your care team and office staff to access patient information from any device. In the event of an audit, your staff needs to be able to securely access the requested documentation whether they are in the field or back in the office.
When the policies and technology are in place to make your data secure yet accessible, your organization can streamline their processes while preparing for audits and preventing data breaches.
Our engineering team firmly believes that security and accessibility must go hand-in-hand when developing our platform. We stay on top of the latest technology, implementing tools like ElasticSearch to get information in the right hands, fast.
To learn more about the innovative decisions being made at Forcura, follow us on Twitter or check out Matthew Martin's upcoming session at Code on the Beach titled "Secure, Scaled, Realtime Search and Analytics in the Cloud" on August 14, 2016.
