Cloud computing is a critical component for a healthcare organization. When done right, health-related information is protected from the public, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are embracing it for sharing critical medical information with their employees.
However, can we trust the cloud to ultimately manage, access, and transfer sensitive personal and medical information? As a matter of fact, ensuring that patients’ medical information remains undisclosed is not just part of the ethical standard that healthcare employees must uphold today; it’s a principle that applies to historical medical records. By ignoring healthcare laws, negligent organizations risk prosecution.
The answer to all of this? HIPAA compliance!
What is HIPAA?
HIPAA is a set of rules that outlines the disclosures and allowable uses of patient medical records. Enshrined in it is the information guiding when, how, and who may have access to medical records. It also sets the standard for unauthorized access to patient health information.
Why Use the Cloud for Healthcare?
The answer is simple: to derisk your business. This is especially helpful for small to medium-sized businesses that lack the capital for on-premise servers. With an effective BAA in place, you can offload the HIPAA responsibilities to cloud providers. Note that you are still responsible for securing and managing any applications or web pages that interact with the cloud service. A breach in these areas would be on you to resolve.
HIPAA Compliant Cloud Services
When processing personal health information (PHI), businesses must follow industry best practices for healthcare data security and take every reasonable step to protect it. In addition, businesses must consider the following when leveraging HIPAA-compliant cloud services:
- HIPAA-compliant clouds must support single sign-on or two-step authentication and support the transfer of ePHI that is encrypted.
- Non-HIPAA-compliant clouds don’t offer a BAA that covers entities. Without a BAA, you are responsibile for data breaches that happen on their cloud. For example, cloud services, like iCloud and Apple, fall into this category and should not be used.
- Some cloud services may not provide essential integrated security services for HIPAA compliance, which is why ePHI storage can’t be stored on them.
Cloud service providers that support HIPAA compliance include Box Enterprise and Elite, G Suite, Google Drive, Dropbox Business, Microsoft OneDrive, and E5. Note, not all the services from these cloud providers are HIPAA compliant. As such, care must be taken to review each service for compliance. For example, AWS released a white paper titled “Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services” that details which AWS services are HIPAA-compliant. This white paper also detailed the different Amazon resources needed for building a HIPAA-compliant architecture.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
Using a cloud computing service provider is essential, but special consideration must be made to guarantee HIPAA compliance. That means you must 1) understand HIPAA compliance and 2) vet every cloud service that you’re using for HIPAA compliance.
Need help managing healthcare data through the cloud? Connect with a cloud partner like Uplancer to help you navigate the challenges of HIPAA compliance for your tech infrastructure today.
