HITECH Compliance Simplified
Healthcare information and specifically Electronic Patient Healthcare (ePHI) has been in the news recently and featured as part of healthcare reform. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) component of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009 has not received as much press as the rest of healthcare reform but it has a greater near-term impact. HITECH uses a combination of incentives and penalties to encourage meaningful and secure use of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions. This paper addresses the privacy and security components of HITECH and provides examples of workable solutions to address the requirements. A case study is used to illustrate viable strategic and tactical solutions employed to address the privacy and security requirements.
Key Takeaways:
This paper introduces the HITECH privacy and security requirements. One solution outlines using HITRUST's Common Security Framework (CSF) to meet the HITECH requirements. The goal of our study is to provide information technology (IT) and information security professionals with an opportunity to identify and address their current requirements. A few key points include:
- Use of HITECH as an opportunity to understand and identify key compliance requirements (PCI, NIST, ISO, etc) of a healthcare organization
- Introduction to HITRUST and CSF - the only comprehensive security framework for health companies
- Exploration of the assessment methodology for HITECH and many other industry standards and regulations
- Introduction to a one of its kind solution for proactive monitoring and compliance management focused on EMR systems and clinical applications
- Case study of a hospital system working on compliance and security challenges with the help of the ActiveGuard® technology platform and certified expertise of a trusted partner like Solutionary
