Healthcare providers need to meet HIPAA compliance requirements to protect their customers’ privacy. Accidental sharing of patent information happens within the healthcare industry. The approach to security has changed because of fines and penalties imposed on medical providers.

HIPAA Key Points

The three rules of HIPAA: Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule requires covered entities to protect individually identifiable health information (IIHI). IIHI includes.

• Name
• Address
• Telephone listing
• Email addresses
• Account numbers
• Date of birth
• Medical record number
• Social security number
• Biometric records
• Genomic sequence
• Vaccination status
• Diagnostic imaging
• Treatment history
• Physician identification
• Protected health information
• Individually identifiable financial information
• Unstructured data

This rule applies to organizations that receive federal funding. Organizations need to enable a security strategy for HIPAA regulatory compliance. Healthcare providers include medical facilities, hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices, dentists, pharmacies, laboratories, nursing homes, hospices, long-term care facilities, dialysis centers, ambulance services, public health departments, schools, universities, research institutions, state governments, tribal governments, military bases, correctional facilities, veterans’ medical centers, and other similar types of entities.

Data Breaches And Penalties

2021 was the highest number of HIPAA violation cases since 2009. The primary causes were weak security policies, poorly defined security control strategy, or improperly budgeted or hired competent compliance officers and IT SecOps teams. Phishing emails, credit card data breaches, stolen laptops, patient data leakage, etc., are examples of last year’s leading causes of data breaches in healthcare. Penalties for HIPAA non-compliance can reach up to $1.5 million per year.

Medical records are also lucrative on the black market because they never get deleted, unlike credit card numbers. If the records are complete, they contain a plethora of data. Information could include the patient’s medical history, demographics, health insurance, and contact information.

Health organizations also need to ensure that these emails aren’t intercepted or altered in transit. Many HIPAA-covered entities, including significantly smaller healthcare providers, do not have in-house IT staff to support on-premise email solutions.

Health providers need to ensure you’re using end-to-end (E2EE) encryption when sending sensitive information such as the PHI. Email encryption providers like Trustifi offer this feature. Health providers should consult NIST for advice on suitable encryption standards. AES 128, 192, or 256-bit encryption.

Role Of Data Loss Prevention In HIPAA Compliance.

Health-related data is moving more from paper to electronic records. Healthcare organizations are managing and protecting their sensitive data using encryption methods. Businesses involved with the use or management of PHI of individuals must follow security guidelines to avoid penalties.

Data visibility helps organizations gain more insight into how individuals within an organization interact with data. DLP can remediate various security challenges, including insider threats, office 365 data security, and user behavior.

• Data breaches cause damage to the brand, regulatory HIPAA violations, and loss of trust with the patients.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions require involving stakeholders.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions must be implemented correctly and well maintained.
• Data Loss Prevention solutions are complex. Encryption is necessary because it protects data.

Data Loss Prevention solves three significant objectives that apply to most organizations:

• First, do healthcare organizations collect and store personally identifiable information?
• Second, do healthcare providers need to protect the privacy of their customer’s healthcare records and information?
• Third, how do you know if someone is using your network without permission?

DLP solutions like Trustifi can classify intellectual property in unstructured and structured forms.

Email Encryption And DLP – One Solution For HIPAA Compliance

The hacker community knows that most security adaptive controls rarely get fully deployed, except for organizations that spend big dollars outsourcing to an MSSP or MSP service.

The following events are some of the leading causes of data leaks in 2022.

1. Misconfigured Software Settings.
2. Social Engineering
3. Recycled Passwords
4. Poor Encryption
5. Software Vulnerabilities
6. Use of Default Passwords.

Email encryption as a standalone does not fully cover HIPAA compliance, even for basic requirements for message protection. Data Loss Prevention identified protected compliance content within the email message in parallel with email encryption. It instilled rules to prevent HIPAA-protected data from leaving through the email channel by enacting email encryption to protect information attempting to leave the organization unprotected.

Simplify Email And DLP Solutions For HIPAA Compliance

However, implementing an encryption service isn’t enough to ensure HIPAA compliance. Healthcare providers need to ensure you’ve configured the service properly and correctly using your encryption service. Here are a few things you should consider: 

1. Ensure the email encryption solution provides a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) before you use their service to send any emails containing PHI. This agreement outlines the responsibilities of both you and the provider for ensuring the confidentiality of your patient’s PHI.
2. Healthcare providers need to gain written consent from their patients before sending any PHI via email, even if the organization is using a HIPAA-compliant email provider. Before patients agree to have their information sent via email, the healthcare provider needs to advise them of the associated risks—only after they’ve declared they’re willing to accept these risks can you send PHI via email.
3. Make sure health providers need to store all emails containing PHI in a secure archive, including all documentation related to your use of encryption to secure these emails. The retention period for this information is usually six years, but this can change state-to-state, so check your state laws on email archiving for HIPAA compliance.
4. Health providers need to configure their encryption service to use end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption secures data at rest and transit using a fundamental public architecture. The sender uses a public key to encrypt the email, and the recipient uses a private key, known only to them, to decrypt it.

Leveraging vendors that can simplify an adaptive security control while demonstrating a logical time to value while enabling most functional capabilities within the solution should be paramount to the organization.

Email Encryption Solution From Trustifi

Trustifi One-Click Compliance™ and Data Loss Protection features make it easy to prove HIPAA compliance and ensure your data remains secure, even if a healthcare employee forgets to encrypt an email manually. The email administrator quickly selects which standards and Data Loss Prevention policies must comply with HIPAA. Trustifi’s intelligent AI Engine will scan all outbound emails for sensitive content such as student records and automatically encrypt them.

With Trustifi’s One-Click Compliance™, the solution takes the complexity out of compliance.

For an additional layer of security between potential attackers and your sensitive data, you can request that recipients verify their identities via multi-factor authentication(MFA).

With Trustifi, healthcare employees can send secure encrypted emails without remembering to click the encrypt email button. Just as quickly, recipients open an encrypted email with a single click even if they don’t have Trustifi themselves.

The email administrator sets all the DLP and email encryption policies on the backend to prevent accidental data loss of PHI-HIPAA confidential information. Other solutions require users to log in to a portal to access encrypted emails, adding complexity to sending and receiving messages.

“One-Click” Encrypt And Decrypt With Trustifi

Trustifi makes sending and opening emails simpler than ever. No log-ins, portals, or passwords are needed.

Groundbreaking Technology Supporting Optical Character Recognition Technology

Trustifi’s OCR technology uses machine learning to scan email attachments such as images and PDF files. It then recognizes elements such as a credit card scan or a screenshot of a financial statement and categorizes those attachments as sensitive. The attachment files are automatically encrypted, reducing the opportunity for employees/individuals to transmit unprotected confidential material.

Emails Get Automatically Scanned

The system automatically scans outgoing emails, applies the rules your administrator sets, and then finds the https://trustifi.com/outbound/email-encryption/with no input from the user. This ensures that sensitive data and attachments are not at risk before reaching their intended recipient.

Culture

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, easily configurable Data Loss Prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SecOps make the company culture secure and a financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.

Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

Trustifi has an extensive roster of clientele throughout North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. As a global cybersecurity provider of both inbound and outbound email protection, Trustifi currently supports customers from countries including the USA, Canada, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the UK, the Netherlands, India, the UAE, China, and Japan, Cyprus, the Philippines, and more. The company has also developed “One-Click Compliance” capabilities that cater to a range of security regulations worldwide, including PDPO for Hong Kong, POPI for South Africa, GDPR for Europe, and LGPD for Brazil.