If you’re a HIPAA-covered entity or enterprise affiliate, you possible know that affected person PHI could solely be created, acquired, maintained, and transmitted as permitted by the HIPAA Safety Rule and the HIPAA Privateness Rule.  But you could not have centered in your firm’s web site as a spot the place PHI is collected and transmitted.  If you’re topic to HIPAA, it’s best to frequently assess your web site information practices.  As described on this weblog publish, it’s best to be sure third-party trackers like Meta Pixel are usually not accessing and disclosing information behind the scenes. However widespread customer-facing instruments shouldn’t be neglected. Frequent methods through which PHI could also be collected and transmitted embrace:
- Dwell Chat
- Affected person Portals
- On-line Affected person Types
- On-line Scheduling Instruments
- Evaluations and Testimonials
- Electronic mail
- On-line loyalty Packages
The HIPAA Privateness Rule requires that entities that create, obtain, preserve, and/or transmit PHI take particular measures to guard it. For instance, if your organization retains individually identifiable medical data on a server, that server have to be encrypted and safe. Transmitting PHI contains sending data by way of electronic mail, textual content, net types or different kinds of digital messaging. Storing PHI contains storing data in apps, information facilities, and many others. If your organization web site collects, shops, or transmits PHI and doesn’t take affordable measures to safe that information, it could violate HIPAA.
To start remediating dangers, firms ought to:
- Buy and implement an SSL certificates for the corporate web site
- Guarantee all net types on the corporate web site are encrypted and safe
- Solely ship emails containing PHI by way of encrypted electronic mail servers
- Associate with website hosting firms which might be HIPAA-compliant and have processes for shielding PHI
- Execute BAAs with third events which have entry to PHI (together with website hosting firms)
- Be sure that PHI is simply accessible by licensed people inside your organization
