Data breaches are occurring more frequently, and hospitals are facing multi-million dollar penalties to settle patient data protection violations. In Early May, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University, both in New York City, paid $4.8 million to settle HIPAA violation charges, making it the largest HIPAA settlement to date.
Netwrix Corp., a provider of change and configuration auditing solutions, offers the following four practices to help ensure HIPAA compliance.
1. Establish policies that prevent risk at every level. Strict policies should be set in place that apply throughout the system, from user applications to operating systems.
2. Ensure those policies work. If risk policies aren't working, there is no point to having them in place. Consistently check the efficacy of such policies, and create alerts or reports when they are violated.
3. Be transparent. Enacting policy controls will be most useful if compliance is transparent and visible to users. Create reports that clearly demonstrate compliance.
4. Consider auditing solutions that automatically change with evolving infrastructure. Being proactive and frontloading efforts to detect breaches can help avoid compliance violations, especially during a time when infrastructure and requirements are consistently changing.
5. Proactively address stricter compliance requirements. Compliance regulations are becoming more strict, so addressing these potential changes early on can help organizations prepare to respond in the event of a data breach.
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