What is Meaningful Use and How Does it Relate To HIPAA and HITECH?

Nov 3, 2021 Lazarus Alliance 0 Comment

Healthcare data and privacy have been a priority for lawmakers and IT professionals for decades. Maintaining privacy related to health information, and giving ownership and agency over disclosure to patients, drives current regulations around Personal Health Information (PHI). The most important of these regulations, HIPAA, has undergone various changes and revisions over time to meet modern security demands. One of these changes, the implementation of HITECH and digital record keeping, includes several additional rules on managing digital health records, including the concept of “meaningful use.”

Here, we will discuss what it means when HITECH legal language encourages the meaningful use of health records and how that can impact compliance and security.

What is NIST SP 800-171 and What Role Does it Play in Defense Contracting Compliance?

Oct 22, 2021 Lazarus Alliance 0 Comment

The document library of the NIST website can be daunting and seemingly endless in terms of the various frameworks, controls and requirements that it provides. The 800 series, in particular, while important and, in many cases, necessary, is also hard to penetrate if you don’t already have some knowledge of what it contains. This can challenge organizations working with the DoD supply chain, especially those handling classified or sensitive material.

This article will cover one of these publications: NIST 800-171. This document defines security for a specific form of government information that many contractors under the executive or defense departments: CUI. While important, this document also informs several important security frameworks, namely CMMC.

What is NIST 800-66, and How Does it Apply to HIPAA?

Sep 22, 2021 Lazarus Alliance 0 Comment

Cybersecurity is a community practice. Different innovations and discussions about new vulnerabilities, threats and controls inevitably influence security implementations in multiple markets and industries, depending on their applicability. This is just as true for healthcare, an industry generally governed by HIPAA. HIPAA, however, is complex, and organizations working in healthcare often look outside their own industry to help them better understand cybersecurity outside just hitting compliance checklists. That’s where NIST 800-66 comes in.

In this article, we’ll discuss HIPAA security and how it relates to NIST 800-66. This NIST document helps healthcare providers under HIPAA understand more advanced security controls that could support their compliance, privacy and cybersecurity controls.