The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is designed to protect individuals’ sensitive health information when they transfer to a new job, as they will likely have to switch over to the new company’s health insurance plan if they choose not to purchase insurance privately. These regulations apply to companies in all industries, not just those in the healthcare sector.
Any employer that offers health insurance coverage or disability benefits to its employees must comply with HIPAA regulations. In the process of providing these benefits, employers must collect health information, and this presents the risk of violating the HIPAA requirements.
What Constitutes a HIPAA Violation in the Workplace?
Your employees’ health information is protected under HIPAA’s Privacy Rule, meaning that you are not permitted to share this information with anyone, even within your organization. Any medical records your company collects in servicing your company’s health plans are protected under this rule.
However, the rule does not apply to any documentation provided by an employee to verify sick leave and other medically related absences, including worker’s compensation claims. If you reach out to your employee’s health care provider, though, any information you receive will be protected under the Privacy Rule.
Who Must Comply with HIPAA Regulations?
In many companies, it is the human resources department that handles all of the details of employees’ health benefits, so it is crucial that your staff in this area is aware of the requirements for complying with HIPAA regulations. If your company health plan covers 50 employees or more, you’ll need to follow the HIPAA guidelines to protect your employees.
If your company’s health plan is managed by an external organization, you’ll need to follow the HIPAA rules, even if you don’t meet the 50-employee threshold. Furthermore, if your company provides additional health benefits beyond insurance, including flexible spending accounts and employee assistance programs, you’ll need to comply with HIPAA in these areas as well.
Implementing a Security Management Process
The best way to prevent HIPAA violations is to conduct a thorough risk analysis throughout your organization. Start by identifying the types of health information your company collects and where that data is stored. Once you have determined this, you can analyze each component for potential risks and vulnerabilities that could put your employees’ information at risk.
After completing this initial analysis, the next step is to set up security measures to minimize exposure to the vulnerabilities you have discovered. Clearly document any policies, procedures, and processes that you put in place to protect sensitive information and communicate the requirements to all of your employees so that everyone knows what is expected of them.
In creating your security protocols, you’ll need to take into account both physical and digital threats. This can include adding locks to storage room doors and requiring multi-factor authentication for computers and other devices that have access to health information.
Your job doesn’t stop there, though; you’ll need to monitor your security measures on an ongoing basis to ensure they continue to protect sensitive information adequately as new threats are discovered. Over time, security measures that were once effective may lose their power and hackers and other thieves become more sophisticated. Re-evaluate your security protocols frequently to ensure everything is up to current security standards.
Finally, you need to make sure that your security measures protect data not just within your organization, but in transit as well. If you need to transmit information back and forth with a third-party healthcare service provider, that data will need to be secured through encryption to prevent unauthorized access. It is always best to restrict access to sensitive data to only those who truly need it in order to minimize risk.
What Happens After a HIPAA Violation?
If you are concerned that a violation may have occurred somewhere in your organization, it is critical that you take steps right away to remedy the issue. The first step is to determine where the information was exposed and how that came to pass in the first place. Once you have identified the source of the problem, you can develop new, stronger security measures to prevent a similar leak from happening again in the future.
As your business grows, you’ll need to step up your security measures and provide additional training to your human resources staff and others who work with employee health information to ensure they know what to do to prevent HIPAA violations from occurring in the workplace.
Gap analysis can help you determine any shortcomings in your existing security protocols so that you can identify areas in need of improvement. This valuable tool can help your organization stay on top of the latest changes to HIPAA rules to ensure that you stay in compliance with the guidelines set out by the rule.
