healthcare

DSS HIPAA Compliance

overview

What is HIPAA Compliance?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) sets the guidelines for how a person’s protected health information is treated and safeguarded. Specifically, it spells out the rules for acquiring, modification, sharing, disclosure, transmission and protection of customer data by the specter of organizations engaged in providing healthcare and insurance services. Titled “covered entities”, these participants are required to abide by the law of non-disclosure of customers’ health data and facilitate its secure safekeeping and transmission. According to the law, the covered entity, which could be a health provider, pharmacy, insurance company, rehabilitation institution and other related parties are fully accountable for the integrity of information entrusted to it. The following requirements apply under the HIPAA legislation:

  • Privacy and confidentiality

    Protected health information should not be disclosed to unauthorized parties without consent of the bearer. This includes non-disclosure to employers, third-party individuals or organizations not directly involved in providing medical, insurance services, etc. to the owner of the data.

  • Availability

    The law stipulates that the copy of relevant information be provided to the bearer upon his/her request. The bearer has the right to edit and update the associated health records with the collaboration of the covered entity when necessary. The covered entity is also responsible for long-term storage and archival of the person’s health data.

  • Protection

    The law imposes rigorous restrictions on how the information is acquired, stored and transmitted. Regarding electronic data management which is prevalent today, it states that the covered entity must implement modern authentication and encryption mechanisms to prevent inappropriate viewing or eavesdropping.

For more information on the HIPAA regulation requirements, consult this website.

HIPAA COMPLIANCE

Amazon S3 and HIPAA Compliance

hipaa compliance

The Amazon S3 platform offers a cost-efficient alternative to store your customers’ digital records. All incoming data is automatically duplicated across several distinct locations to provide high durability and availability of customer data. The implemented encryption algorithms protect the confidentiality of in-transit (inbound and outbound) and “at-rest” (resident) data as required by the HIPAA provision. The industry-grade authentication helps delegate specific access control permissions to different user and administrator accounts.

HIPAA Compliance

Need Backups?

Try DSS Cloud Backups with HIPAA Compliance

In accordance to HIPAA, covered entities are obliged to assure their customers’ data is highly available and can be recovered in case the disaster affects its main storage repository. This type of redundancy is generally achieved through data backups which are placed at a geographically disperse location.

DSS backup solutions utilize Amazon’s proven AWS platform to store customer data. The software is deployed within seconds and helps to seamlessly backup customers’ data, transfer it to the cloud, and retrieve it any time it’s needed. The HIPAA requirements are addressed across every stage of the cloud backup transaction:

  • On transit

    Any data sent to the cloud is automatically encrypted using the hardened SSL protocols which eliminate the possibility of an outsider gaining access to it.

  • At Rest

    The information residing on the Amazon S3 cloud space is protected with the client side encryption up to 256 bit in strength and can incorporate over a dozen of industry-grade encryption algorithms (available options are: AES 128-256 bit, DES 64 bit, RC2 40-128 bit and 3DES 112-168 bit). Only the end user/covered entity owns the decryption key, which assures the integrity and privacy of data stored on the Amazon-run cloud.

At no point does DSS or any other unauthorized party have access to the customer data. All data transfers take place directly between the customer and Amazon S3, transparently to DSS which partakes to facilitate the exchange of the scrambled data only. 

DSS HIPAA Compliance ensured that my data was not only compliant, but well protected using Amazon's S3 Storage.
DSS HIPAA COMPLIANCE

DSS data backup solutions facilitate transparent and secure aggregation, transmission, storage and retrieval of customer backup data from the local source to the Amazon cloud infrastructure, ensuring HIPAA compliance throughout any stage of the process.

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