HIPAA Compliance

HIPAA Compliance

In 1996 a law called HIPAA was passed, which stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.  Due to the increasing demand by other individuals, including health insurance companies, to have access to private medical information, stronger laws needed to be passed to protect patient privacy.  This law does affect medical transcriptionists as well as other health care providers.  The privacy rule requires that covered entities enter into a written agreement with each business associate. 

The following is more information on how we are doing our part to remain HIPAA compliant:

1.   Our servers are all located in highly secure data centers, thereby making it impossible for equipment (such as a hard drive containing medical data) to be stolen.
    
2. Our servers do not accept Anonymous-FTP connections, the most common hacker method of seeking out an FTP site for possible attack.
    
3. FTP username and password is required.
4. We proactively monitor and react to intrusion attempts into our systems through the use of a sophisticated Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and multiple operating system level security tools.
   
5. No copies of your files reside on any offsite or long-term storage media.  We only backup your data nightly for disaster recovery purposes.  No tapes are used and this data never leaves the building.  In addition, backups are overwritten the next day.