COMPLY WITH HIPAA and HITECH

Protecting Electronic Health Information

To encourage the widespread use of electronic data interchange in healthcare, the U.S. Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA, Title II). HIPAA also requires the Department of Health and Human Services to establish national standards that address the security and privacy of health information. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) was enacted in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to promote the adoption of health information technology. HIPAA and HITECH were updated in 2013 when the Omnibus Rule was released. The challenge for IT departments lies in identifying the controls required to ensure the security and privacy of this data while proving to auditors that each control has been properly implemented, maintained, and monitored.

What is your HIPAA security compliance score?

Elemental Cyber Security HIPAA/HITECH policy automation framework enables healthcare insurers and providers, universities, and other organizations that handle patient health information to adhere to HIPAA/HITECH best practices for network access control, host security configuration management, as well as systems and software inventory. Deploying a full range of policies in these categories enables organizations to effectively assess the security posture of the systems that contain or use protected health information (PHI).

How does it work?

The Elemental Security Platform (ESP) automates the arduous and often manual processes involved in making these security compliance assessments. In addition, it gives organizations the option of controlling access to these systems by placing network-based controls on those that process electronic PHI (ePHI) data, with access based on compliance with the organization’s security policies. As a dedicated HIPAA/HITECH policy set incorporated into the ESP, the Elemental solution provides an automation framework for deploying and enforcing policies on computing resources that store and have access to ePHI. Using this approach, organizations can deploy security policies that address key aspects of the HIPAA standards for security.

Within minutes of ESP software installation on target machines, the ESP system will accurately calculate your compliance score for the HIPAA requirements and generate a pass/fail list of specific technical controls. With that information in hand, your team in charge of security compliance will know exactly where your weak points are and how to address them. Through historical compliance monitoring and reporting, they can also demonstrate continuous security posture improvements to management and auditors thus reducing cost and time-to-compliance.

ESP provides policies that directly address the following security controls mandated by HIPAA:

1. ACCESS CONTROL
2. AUDIT CONTROL
3. AUTHENTICATION CONTROL
4. INTEGRITY CONTROL

How is Elemental different?

Elemental's unique Cyber Security Platform enables continuous compliance by actually implementing and enforcing the technical security controls mandated by HIPAA-HITECH. The solution offers faster time-to-compliance, audit-ready reports, improved network security, ready to deploy security policies and risk assessment — all from one unified easy-to-use web based user interface.

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