Everything You Should Know About the HIPAA Security Risk Assessment Procedure
HIPAA Security Risk Assessment
By leveraging electronic health records, HIPAA requirements for securing important and confidential patient information encourage increased information exchange. While such restrictions improve the standard and effectiveness of healthcare systems, they create a significant burden on healthcare companies since failing to comply with HIPAA standards can result in significant monetary penalties.
A risk assessment is an important part of ensuring HIPAA compliance. Inadequate or incorrect risk evaluations, on the contrary, may lead to gaps in your security procedures and data breaches. A dearth of in-house IT expertise and resources might make risk assessments difficult.
What Is HIPAA Risk Assessment?
Any entity that creates, receives, retains, or distributes electronically protected health information (ePHI) must have sufficient safeguards in place. They include identifying ePHI security threats and putting processes in place to assure HIPAA Security Rule compliance.
A HIPAA risk assessment is a risk analysis that is conducted to investigate the security dangers to the ePHI of an entity, which may causea breach of Privacy Rule. A HIPAA security risk assessment gives detailed instructions for completing certain standards, some of which are essential and others that can be addressed.
What Is the Process of Performing HIPAA Security Risk Assessment?
When it comes to doing a HIPAA risk assessment, you may use any approach that complies with the standards. Here's what you'll need to accomplish.
• Customize the risk assessment to your company's needs
HIPAA risk assessments may be tailored to:
o A company's capabilities, complexity, and size, as well as its software, hardware, other applicationsand security capabilities.
o The probability and severity of potential security risks
o The cost of security measures
• Establishing the scope
When it comes to a project, determining the scope is one of the first tasks in a risk assessment. You must consider all ePHI, irrespective of where and how information is produced, received, stored, or transmitted.
• Gather information
This step requires you to review all documentation for previous and current projects in order to gather information about your use of ePHI. You must specify: What ePHI does your organisation have access to? Who has access to the data, and how do they get it? How is the ePHI maintained?
• Evaluate security measures
You should assess your current security measures. You may start by documenting the security protocols in place to protect ePHI.
• Identify weaknesses
The information you have gathered so far should enable you to identify any holes in the security systems.
• Determine security precautions
After the assigning of the risk levels, you must create a list of corrective activities to do to reduce the risks to a reasonable level.
• Record your findings.
All your results must be documented to clearly describe the PHI with which you work, the dangers and weaknesses, and the way you want to mitigate the identified threats to the integrity and security of ePHI.
The HIPAA security risk assessment in accordance with HIPAA requirements can help you safeguard ePHI.