Monday 12 March 2012

How To Find The Best HIPAA Compliant Hosting Provider For Your Helath Center ?

Due to the parallel growth of IT in health sector, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), has now become a vital part of all the the technology implementations in a healthcare institute. A HIPAA Compliant web hosting is necessary when you want to host the records and files of your patient on a server. The HIPAA Compliance makes it very strict to allow access to Patient health information (PHI) only for the person who are meant to be. It also implements other security methods encryption of data in the network, intrusion detection and logging of operations on the system. Currently, there are several top notch hosting providers with Hipaa compliance. Researching on each of their features deeply would help you find the right one that suits your health care institute and save you the cost of leasing expensive hosting service from the provider. Stay tuned for the analysis reports of each HIPAA Compliant hosting provider!

There are dozens of such compatible hosting providers popping up every month. An analysis on some of the Best HIPAA Compliant Hosting Providers could reveal staggering difference in the prices of each of them. This is the area in Hosting is a gold mine for all those hosting providers. The HIPAA documentation doesn't specify ' techinically' how these procedures in law should be implemented ( Eg: as encryption- for secure data storage , the HIPAA documentation specify exactly which algorithm to follow ). This cramps up the people at health institutions who are less technically familiar with computing terms. This unawareness is often exploited by several hosting providers and charged high fee for small services. Unless you want to see a hefty hosting bill every month, its better to conduct an audit from a trusted HIPAA expert and estimate the actual cost before jumping in for a plan.

Should I hire a System Admin and maintain my own system HIPAA Compliant system or sign-up for a full-package service from an external vendor?

First, there is no one size fits all solution for HIPAA Compliant hosting. You'll have custom db, services etc even if you are going to get the service directly from a vendor. But this will, of course be far cheaper and reliable than hiring a sys admin and setting up your own systems.

I've been investigating on more hipaa compliant hosting services and found this useful discussion in YCombinator News. YCombinator is one of the world's best start-up incubators and recently there have been new companies focusing on HIPAA related services. It will be good bet to get services from one of these new service providers since they'll be very responsive and much more affordable. If you got to the thread you can directly find some contact info of company owners and you can talk to them for a special plan that suits you. Soon, I'll try to list out about the HIPAA providers discussed in the this YC thread. 

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