Telehealth Platforms and HIPAA: Data Privacy Compliance for Remote Services

With the expansion of the telehealth service, ensuring the privacy of its data and compliance with all relevant laws has become a top priority for healthcare providers. Telehealth platforms must put in place robust security measures to protect patient information and avoid fines for regulatory noncompliance. This guide looks at the compliance requirements most relevant to telehealth, with a sharp focus on ensuring that health data remains secure and private—because the side effects of not doing so can harm all the parties involved.

Understanding HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules for Telehealth

The very clear instructions entailed in HIPAA’s Privacy and Security Rules detail precisely how telehealth providers must manage protected health information (PHI). To remain on the right side of the law and to maintain the trust of the patients you serve, it is crucial that you follow these rules to the letter.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule governs the use and disclosure of a patient’s protected health information by telehealth providers. When we say “govern,” we mean it in the most practical sense. Telehealth providers must follow the Privacy Rule. They must also—the phrase we used above for the most part says this well—keep in mind what the Privacy Rule allows and requires when they use and share a patient’s PHI with a telehealth service. A good place to start to get the full picture is the HHS website.

To protect electronic PHI (ePHI), the Security Rule of HIPAA demands that specific safeguards be established. These safeguards are:

• Safeguards of an administrative nature
• Safeguards of a physical nature
• Safeguards of a technical nature

These protections cooperate to ensure that ePHI is not compromised and that any compromising entity is discovered. To learn more about these safeguards, why they are necessary, and how they function—or malfunction—together, visit https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/security/laws-regulations/index.html.

Following these rules is crucial if a company wants to avoid some serious negative outcomes: being fined, being sued, and experiencing a public relations fiasco. One telehealth company that didn’t follow the rules got nailed with sanctions because it didn’t encrypt anything or control who got to see the data. After the telehealth company plugged these big holes, it could say with confidence that it was following the rules and keeping everything private.

Providers of telehealth must adopt secure practices that are in step with the privacy and security regulations of HIPAA to eliminate the risks.

Ensuring Data Encryption and Secure Communication

Telehealth patient data is at risk, but using encryption and secure communication channels can protect it. End-to-end encryption must—and can—be implemented by telehealth providers to safeguard ePHI during transmission. This means that the information is accessible to only the intended recipient in a 1-to-1 conversation.

A different video conferencing platform that observes HIPAA might include the minimum standards needed to meet this requirement, and those standards are:

• Data encryption: All data in transit and at rest must be encrypted.
• Authentication of Users: Before accessing the platform, all users must be authenticated.
• Secure Data Storage: Data must be stored in a manner that it is secure.

An encrypted video conferencing solution that has multi-factor authentication is how one telehealth provider ensured their security. With this layer of protection in place, the provider satisfied my standards for HIPAA compliance. Using platforms along these lines is one way to keep data secure. This is especially pertinent when discussing telehealth, as there is a stark contrast—and by “stark,” I mean “serious”—between the number of intercepted video calls sent unencrypted versus those sent encrypted. If your data is secure, only your authorized personnel should have access to it.

Establishing Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with Vendors

Many essential services are provided to telehealth companies by third-party vendors. These services include IT support, cloud storage, and computer programming. When you consider that these functionalities are necessary for telehealth to operate, it becomes clear that telehealth companies are heavily dependent on third-party vendors.

A business associate is any third-party service that handles personal electronic health information (ePHI) for a healthcare provider. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that covered entities have business associate agreements (BAAs) with their vendors to ensure that ePHI remains secure and private. If you need help understanding what a BAA is or what it entails, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has a wealth of information on its website.

A clear delineation of each party’s responsibility in securing ePHI is essential to a BAA. This is particularly true for responsibilities regarding encryption, which is the mechanism most used within and without the cloud to provide a layer of security. Most telemedicine vendors are cloud-based, and the cloud is a notoriously insecure environment. Telehealth providers therefore need to be extremely vigilant in making sure their vendors—like those who serve the ePHI directly—are performing in a manner consistent with all the necessary regulations.

A telehealth firm avoided being fined by setting up a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with its cloud storage provider. This accord laid out the ways and the means that would keep the telehealth company’s patient data safe and secure and ensure that if any data breaches were to occur, the telehealth company would be notified right away. Putting these kinds of agreements in place is crucial for telehealth companies that work with external providers, especially those in the cloud, if they want to remain on the right side of HIPAA.

Conducting Risk Assessments and Staff Training

Maintaining compliance with HIPAA requires regular risk assessments and employee training, particularly for the staff members who are on the front lines of any health care entity and who, by virtue of their work, come into contact with protected health information.

Telehealth providers can pinpoint not just the weak spots in their security framework but also the forthcoming threats likely to target those spots by assessing the risk to their HIPAA compliance. Security for telehealth is fundamentally about three things: storing data, transmitting data, and controlling access to that data. Given how low-tech access control should be for telehealth, given all of the emails and text messages that practitioners send to patients and the video services they use to “see” patients, you might wonder why access control made the list of telehealth security essentials. Perform regular risk assessments to ensure that access control really is as good as it should be.

Staff training is extremely important. All staff members must have more than just a basic knowledge of HIPAA. They must understand not only what it says but also the spirit of the law: to protect the private health information of American citizens. Because HIPAA sets federal standards, all states and their subdivisions must comply with them. And since local governments have access to an enormous amount of private health data, the necessity of HIPAA and its enforcement seems apparent.

When flaws are revealed, remedies must be enacted. One telehealth vendor did a risk assessment and found that it employed encryption standards that were, frankly, too old to be secure. This finding prompted not only an update of the telehealth provider’s security measures but also a reassessment of the kinds of data protection protocols that should be in place to keep patient information safe.

A secure environment that satisfies HIPAA’s privacy and security requirements can be established by telehealth providers through consistent risk assessment and routine staff training.

It is vital for telehealth providers to comply with the Privacy and Security Rules of HIPAA in order to safeguard patient data and reduce potential legal liabilities. These regulations control how “covered entities” and their “business associates” can use and disclose “protected health information” (PHI). Since telehealth is simply another way to deliver healthcare, the same rules must be followed as with any in-person medical visit. Still, because telehealth can use any number of electronic mediums and so is potentially more accessible to intruders or more possibly compromising to patient data, the rules may need to be followed even more stringently. Here are some of the key provisions of the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules.

To make certain that telehealth is HIPAA compliant, solicit professional counsel from telehealth specialists at Cohen Healthcare Law Group. They are not only telehealth experts but also know about the healthcare and FDA laws that govern your practice.