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

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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. 

 

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How Does HITECH Relate to HIPAA Compliance?

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HIPAA is a detailed and comprehensive set of regulations governing IT systems and data handling in the healthcare industry. As times change, so too has the language of HIPAA evolved to address those changes. One of these updates is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009. This law modernized HIPAA and directed entities in healthcare to adopt more modern, digital record keeping and security technologies. 

Here, we’ll cover some of the basics of HITECH and what it changed in the language of HIPAA. 

 

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

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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. 

 

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