Proficio Launches New HIPAA Compliance Insight Service

Managed security service provider Proficio has launched a new HIPAA Compliance Insight Service for U.S healthcare organizations. The new service helps HIPAA-covered entities meet the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, prevent data breaches, and prepare for audits and HHS investigations.

The new service is an enhancement of the MSSP’s ProSOC service, which provides accurate security alerts, threat monitoring, advanced threat detection, and an automated response service.

For healthcare organizations, managing security risks can be an uphill struggle. Under the HIPAA Security standard, there are 154 separate risks that need to be monitored. Tracking those risks is a time-consuming task. The new service helps healthcare organizations to identify and mitigate risks to prevent both data breaches and HIPAA violations.

The failure to monitor and manage risks can be expensive. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights can issue severe financial penalties for organizations that fail to adhere to HIPAA Rules. The failure to monitor and manage risks could also result in vulnerabilities being allowed to persist. Those vulnerabilities could be exploited by hackers and could lead to a costly data breach.

With Proficio’s HIPAA Compliance Insight Service, covered entities can effectively monitor and manage risks. Proficio has also started offering assistance for HIPAA-covered entities by providing a risk assessment service. The risk assessment is one of the most important elements of the HIPAA Security Rule. The risk assessment allows covered entities to thoroughly assess any risks and vulnerabilities that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information. While essential, many OCR investigations have revealed that covered entities have failed to conduct risk assessments regularly. Such a HIPAA violation invariably adds to the financial non-compliance penalty issued.

The new HIPAA Compliance Insight Service also helps to ensure covered entities have the appropriate organizational policies in place to help them comply with HIPAA Rules. The service also makes sure that everything is ready and in place should OCR select an organization for a compliance audit.

The service automatically schedules compliance meetings – hosted by Proficio staff-  where compliance issues are discussed. The service includes the monitoring of assets, generates detailed reports on those assets, and assigns action items to mitigate risks and threats to ePHI

According to Proficio,  “With the HIPAA Compliance Insight service, customers regularly meet with Proficio’s expert security analysts to review each HHS regulation and corresponding report to identify suspicious activity, compliance gaps, and assign and track action items to correct and remediate issues to ensure our customers continue to meet HHS audit protocol.”

Author: Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of NetSec.news