Introduction
With increased regulatory attention paid to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and new regulations impacting healthcare organizations, many Healthcare service providers are exploring technologies to help ensure regulatory compliance.
Under HIPAA, the federal government developed privacy principles and security guidelines for healthcare patients and service providers (entities). The HIPAA Privacy Rule defines patient and entity rights and obligations with respect to patient privacy and “protected health information (PHI)”, while the HIPAA Security Rule defines Standards and Specifications required for electronic PHI (ePHI), to guard against unauthorized use and modification.
This whitepaper describes the benefits of Bradford Networks’ adaptive security platform, and Network Sentry product family, relative to healthcare network security and compliance to the HIPAA Security Rule. Rising compliance pressure, coupled with increasing remote user access to healthcare networks, is creating a business case for better policy management, implementation, and enforcement.
With the challenge of non-standard, multi-vendor network infrastructures, a solution is needed to consolidate and enforce multiple usage policies for people and devices on the network. Network Sentry provides an extremely effective solution for network-wide policy management and automated enforcement, which ultimately aids in HIPAA compliance.
This whitepaper briefly discusses HIPAA concepts and maps Network Sentry functions to HIPAA Standards and Specifications and to a recent checklist used by the enforcement division of Health and Human Services to audit a major healthcare organization, Piedmont Hospital, based in Atlanta, GA, for compliance.
Bradford’s Network Sentry helps significantly address HIPAA compliance requirements with full or partial coverage of:
- 11 out of 18 HIPAA Standards
- 14 out of 42 HIPAA Specifications
- 15 out of 43 items on the Piedmont DHHS Audit checklist