What is HIPAA Compliance

The HIPAA privacy rule requires covered entities to audit all access to PHI. Audit records have to state who accessed the data, what application they accessed, as well as additional data in order to help with investigating data breaches. In order to ensure that your organization is not accidently violating HIPAA violations, or open to manual misconfigurations, it is important that you have clear and repeatable change management process. By automating policies, you can ensure that new policies introduced on your network do not violate HIPAA or other regulatory requirements. By ensuring centralized management of your entire hybrid network, automation ensures that your entire network can maintain a state of continuous compliance. Automation also reduces the amount of resources required to maintain HIPAA compliance. Network security automation, such as that provided by AlgoSec FireFlow and AppChange, can prevent rules that violate HIPAA requirements from being introduced to your network.

The HIPAA Security Rule establishes standards to protect electronic personal health information (PHI) that is created, received, used, or maintained by a covered entity. The Security Rule requires safeguards to ensure that health information remains confidential and secure. Under the HIPAA Security Rule, rules can be created for HIPAA firewall controls, so that each employee’s computer will be configured with the suitable amount of network access. For example, an office manager may not need access to patient names but not their healthcare records, a healthcare provider needs to be able to access patient healthcare records when they are being treated. You can create firewall rules that allow the healthcare providers to have more access, due to their need-to-know, than other employees who do not need to access this. Firewall rules can be created for various positions, to ensure each employee is given appropriate access based on his or her role. Using HIPAA firewall controls ensures that only those people authorized to access PHI can. HIPAA firewall controls are a necessary part of maintaining HIPAA compliance and securing your organization. Not implementing HIPAA firewall controls puts your organization at risk for costly breaches and fines.

According to the HIPAA Security Rule Security Risk Assessment (SRA) Tool, Technical Safeguards, you can:

• Employ hardware, software, and processes that record and inspect activity in that contains or uses PHI.
• Automatically capture and generate audit records that establishes what occurred, when and where it occurred, its source, and the outcome. You should also record the identity of any individuals associated with the event.
• Review and analyze audit records to spot any inappropriate or unusual activity.
• Support on-demand audit review, analysis, and reporting requirements.

Vulnerable portals can expose PHI to application attacks, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) and should be protected by a firewall. Suspicious access to PHI stored in files and databases should be alerted or blocked.

AlgoSec automatically generates pre-populated, audit-ready compliance reports for leading industry regulations which helps reduce audit preparation efforts and costs. AlgoSec also uncovers gaps in the compliance posture and proactively checks every change for compliance violations. AlgoSec provides daily audit and compliance reporting across the entire heterogeneous network estate.  AlgoSec automatically identifies gaps in compliance, enables users to remediate them, and instantly generates compliance reports that users can present “as is” to auditors. As part of this process all firewall rule changes are proactively checked for compliance violations before they are implemented, enabling users to ensure continuous compliance across their organizations.