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What is HITECH?

In 2009, the U.S. Congress passed The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This act seeks to promote the ‘adoption and meaningful use of health information technology.

 

How are HITECH and HIPAA different?

While HITECH and HIPAA are different acts of congress, they are so tightly integrated that most people refer to them as HIPAA/HITECH or just HIPAA. The HITECH act strengthened the HIPPA rules for privacy and security by adding provisions such as the need for covered entities to acquire signed agreements with Business Associates who handle and transmit Protected Health Information (PHI) on their behalf.

Do I need to comply with HITECH?

If you are required by law to comply with HIPAA, you’re required to comply with HITECH as well. The good news is that, if your systems are compliant with HIPAA, it’s not difficult to ensure HITECH compliance as well. However, there are nuances between the two regulations around elements such as patient access to data and breach protocols, so you may need to do some additional compliance planning.

When determining your compliance requirements or status, always consult with qualified legal counsel.

 

Compliance Solutions for Every Type of Business

Connectria helps many different types of businesses ensure the compliance of their systems and data with security and privacy regulations. Here are just some of the types of organizations we work with:

Healthcare and Insurance Providers

If you provide healthcare services or coverage, you’re considered a Covered Entity under HIPAA/HITECH. We can help you take advantage of cloud computing while ensuring your workloads remain compliant and secure.

SaaS Developers

If you develop SaaS applications that handle PHI, you may be considered a Business Associate under HIPAA/HITECH. We can help you set up a secure development and production environment in the cloud.

Managed Service Providers

Looking to offer HIPAA/HITECH compliant cloud services to your healthcare customers? A partnership with Connectria can help you expand your product and services portfolio quickly and with confidence.

“The support from Connectria has been excellent. Even though the hospitals are our direct customers, Connectria’s engineers make themselves available to support our customers when needed. Not all vendors would do that.”

Kevin Lauzon HI-IQ

“We don’t have the time and there are too many parts to managing a HIPAA compliant environment. We want to focus on providing the best HIPAA compliant applications, not managing servers.”

Mason Rothert Mediprocity

Related Resources

 
8 HIPAA Compliance Questions to Ask Your Business Associates
In January 3rd’s post, we discussed the importance of including business associates in your HIPAA risk assessments. You can read the full post here: Is…
 
State of Healthcare Cybersecurity 2019
2019 was set to be a busy year for IT security professionals, especially those in healthcare. We dug into the most recent research on the…
 
Migrating HIPAA Compliant Workloads to AWS or Azure
Public clouds are growing in popularity. According to a recent HIMSS Analytics survey, 83 percent of healthcare organizations are already using cloud-based resources. But what about HIPAA/HITECH?…

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