If you’re in the healthcare industry, chances are you’ve heard about HIPAA compliance audits now being conducted by the Office Of Civil Rights.

The initial phase of 20 HIPAA audits was completed in March and found that many Level 4 Covered Entities - Small providers with 10-50 Provider practices, Community and rural pharmacies and with revenues of less than $50 million - needed the most improvement in electronic record keeping to comply with HIPAA standards.

In many cases, these Level 4 providers relied heavily on paper based workflows and weren’t adhering to Health IT for electronic health records (EHRs) that HIPAA rules seek to mandate for a more efficient and secure healthcare system.

The full preliminary report of the first round of HIPAA audits being conducted by KPMG can be found here.

If your small or medium sized business provides healthcare services, handles electronic health records or other personally identifiable information (PII) you should be making moves to secure this data to avoid complications and penalties that are associated with HIPAA non-compliance that could include the following:

• Loss of Contracts
• Criminal and Civil investigation
• Federal penalties, State fines
• Public Harm and Reputational Risk
• Legal Costs
• Cost of Notification

If you’d like to start making moves to get your healthcare practice in compliance with HIPAA regulations, one of the first moves you should make is deploying encryption services to secure Email messages, large files and removable media such as USB thumb drives, CD’s, DVD’s and Blu-Ray discs that are used to store or share data with patients, partners, colleagues, business associates, Insurance companies, Medicare and Workman’s Compensation.

If you’d like a no-obligation quote on Encryption services that make securing your data a breeze, please complete this form and a representative will be in contact with you shortly! We look forward to hearing from you and helping you with your HIPAA compliance needs.