The Revelations Of HIPAA Compliance Assessments

By Michael Mittel, RapidFire Tools GM

HIPAA presents a tremendous opportunity for MSPs to gain new customers and increase revenues through ongoing HIPAA compliance assessments. If you’re a managed service provider looking to increase or build your HIPAA compliance business, you should be aware of the some of the most common pitfalls that healthcare companies face as they try to comply with the complex regulations. Here are some of the most typical and/or impactful problems that tools like Compliance Manager can reveal about healthcare data networks—and how managed service providers can help their customers address them:

Review Business Associates: All agencies that work with the healthcare organization (known as “Business Associates”) must be HIPAA compliant along with the healthcare organization itself.  This includes accounting firms, financial services companies and resellers that work with the healthcare organization including MSPs. Much of the industry still doesn’t realize that these ancillary partners to healthcare companies must be compliant in order to fulfill the legislation and truly secure electronic healthcare records. If you are an MSP, make sure that you comply with the HIPAA regulations . . . and make sure your healthcare clients ask you to reivew their business partners for HIPAA compliance as well.