The FAMCare Blog

One way for a software solution to help you be HIPAA compliant is to offer you HIPAA encryption as part of the package. But is that something you need to be HIPAA compliant? Technically, no, it’s not mandatory.

The rules state you should use encryption if it would be needed to safeguard electronic Protected Health Information (PHI). But, they do say if you don’t use encryption, you need to have an alternative to encryption that will safeguard as well as encrypting would. Or you need to have documentation with justifiable cause, as to why have taken a different tact with regard to safeguarding PHI.

When you operate a non-profit that deals with clients’ health information, you need to be careful to keep your organization HIPAA compliant. You might follow computer etiquette and train your employees well, but in the middle of a hectic day, one of your caseworkers could inadvertently create a HIPAA violation, if they’re not careful.

I recently read an article in Forbes about how Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are broken. And while some of the points they made were appalling, they weren’t surprising – at least, not to me. We’ve known about the limitations of the government approved EHRs for some time now.