HIPAA COMPLIANCE SFTP SOFTWARE

HIPAA refers to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It’s an important U.S. regulation for securing sensitive medical information like electronic health records (EHR), protected health information (PHI), patients’ personally identifiable information (PII), and other data key to respecting patient privacy.

Operating in compliance with HIPAA is important when you consider that, according to The HIPAA Journal, 92% of U.S. healthcare organizations experienced a cyberattack last year. So, how can secure managed file transfer (MFT) software help you comply with HIPAA and keep EHRs, PHI, and other healthcare data safe?

Well, threats like digital supply chain attacks, ransomware, malicious insiders, and even human error put sensitive healthcare data at risk every day. Managed file transfer (MFT) software, helps you achieve HIPAA compliance by protecting  electronic health records (EHR) and other patient data with file encryption, secure communications, and the establishment of best practices for secure data management.

Securing EHRs, PHI, and other sensitive data while sending them to and receiving them from your digital supply chain is where secure MFT software like Diplomat MFT comes in.

Because the foundation for HIPAA compliance is encryption, a solution like Diplomat MFT is a great place to start. In fact, top hospitals and healthcare organizations like CHRISTUS Healthcare, Mass General Brigham, Molina Healthcare, and many more trust Diplomat MFT to support their HIPAA-compliant data management programs.

Diplomat MFT provides an easy and cost-effective way to leverage the most popular PGP encryption technologies. It can also act as a HIPAA-compliant SFTP server behind our advanced Edge Gateway to keep data secure during transmission. Importantly, Diplomat MFT ensures your mission-critical file transfer processes and data are protected internally, not exposed to threat actors in the DMZ or from the outside.

Another important aspect is providing HIPAA compliance through documentation. Diplomat MFT captures and archives file transfer process data to prove your organization’s practices are consistent with HIPAA compliance, which is required in the event of an audit.

Beyond that, our secure-by-design architecture includes numerous security features to support your security and HIPAA compliant file transfer processes, such as:

• Extensive auditing, reporting, and visibility
• Multi-factor authentication with Time-based One-Time Password support
• Single sign-on integration with granular role-based access controls
• Support for the most current elliptic curve cryptography
• HIPAA-compliant SFTP server

Diplomat MFT makes it easy to establish HIPAA-compliant managed file transfer workflows. That is because Diplomat MFT easily integrates with all the healthcare services and applications you already use, and it supports the rigorous security standards HIPAA demands. Furthermore, Diplomat MFT enables the strengthening of a secure, trusted healthcare supply chain because administrative controls are handled behind the firewall, and unencrypted files are never exposed to the public internet.

Diplomat MFT is trusted by top hospitals and healthcare organizations to keep sensitive healthcare information like electronic health records and protected healthcare information secure and to support their HIPAA-compliant data management programs. You can trust us, too.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a covered entity under HIPAA is either a healthcare services provider (doctor, dentist, pharmacy, nursing home, etc.), health insurance provider (insurance companies, HMOs, employers, governmental agencies and organizations), or healthcare data clearinghouse that create, collect, store, manage, or transmit protected health information (PHI).

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) includes three rules for protecting protected health information (PHI) and keeping patient privacy safe. The Three Rules of HIPAA are:

• HIPAA Privacy Rule, outlines standards for processes to keep patient privacy and PHI safe;
• HIPAA Security Rule, outlines technical requirements for systems used to store, move, and manage PHI; and,
• HIPAA Breach Notification Rule, outlines steps an organization must take to notify authorities and patients in the event that PHI is compromised.

In 2009 the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The goal of HITECH was to complement HIPAA and incentivize the healthcare industry to adopt technologies that would enable faster, more efficient sharing and processing of digital patient information. HITECH also addressed the need for secure storage and transmission of sensitive patient data. That is why the HITECH Act includes data security and privacy protection requirements, along with criminal enforcement provisions and mandatory disclosures for data breaches affecting protected health information (PHI).

Average cost of a healthcare data breach: $10.93 Million (IBM-Ponemon Institute Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023)

Although HIPAA (1996) and HITECH (2009) are two distinct laws, they are complementary in nature. And while it is proper to refer to HIPAA-HITECH, when mentioning HIPAA, the HITECH Act is typically implied as being included.

Data provenance (also known as data ownership or stewardship) is especially important for maintaining regulatory compliance regulations like GDPR, where data created within one country cannot leave those borders. Cloud services, like AWS and Azure, provide features and controls around the location of data that is stored, but care must be taken to ensure misconfigurations don’t result in data being sent to the wrong place and that other connected systems aren’t taking data and moving it where it should not be. That’s why Diplomat MFT with workflow and encryption automation is important to minimize the opportunity for human error as part of a security and compliance strategy for regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, etc.