Skyflow’s holistic approach removes the hardest technical hurdles of HIPAA:
Limit Unneeded PHI Access
Secure Patients’ PHI
Log Every Use of PHI
Fulfill Right of Access Requests
Achieving and maintaining HIPAA compliance shouldn't require painkillers. Skyflow gives you the power to centrally manage and isolate protected electronic health information (ePHI or simply, PHI) in a Data Privacy Vault, making it quick and easy to satisfy HIPAA’s privacy and security requirements.
With Skyflow, whether you’re improving patient outcomes physically or virtually, preserving patient privacy and trust just got simpler. Using a Data Privacy Vault is the first step to true data privacy.
Quickly build and centrally manage the data access flows you need, within your organization and with third parties. Centrally control who sees what data, when, where, and how using any combination of policies, roles, and attributes.
Skyflow Data Privacy Vault takes a zero trust approach to data privacy – never trust, always verify. Every PHI access request gets verified from the Data Privacy Vault so security and privacy don’t have to be a headache.
Remove all PHI from your infrastructure and replace it with format-preserving tokens. With PHI securely protected in your Skyflow vault, the rest of your infrastructure becomes less risky and more flexible, so you can move quickly and not break data privacy.
Keep sensitive PHI isolated in a zero trust Data Privacy Vault instead of scattered across databases or systems. Managing one authoritative PHI data source makes it quick and easy to respond to right of access requests.
HIPAA applies to covered entities and their business associates.
Covered entities are businesses or organizations that create, receive, or transmit PHI, such as health insurance companies that have your claims information, doctors that have your prescription records, and healthcare clearinghouses that help doctors get reimbursements from your insurance.
Business associates are people or entities that perform certain functions or activities that involve PHI on behalf of a covered entity, such as SaaS companies, data storage providers, and medical device manufacturers.
Many aspects of healthcare services and data processing has shifted online, in the form of a talk therapy app or patient signature SaaS. You might wonder whether the project you’re working on falls under the jurisdiction of HIPAA, and even if it doesn’t, what other regulations you might be unaware of.
In general, if you’re collecting, processing, storing, or sharing sensitive PHI, HIPAA likely applies to you. However, if HIPAA doesn’t apply and you are unsure, check out this guidance issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
In 2021, The FTC noted the Health Breach Notification Rule, which requires notification in case of a breach to even apps that are not covered under HIPAA. Many Healthtech apps fall under this Breach Notification Rule. Violations can be as high as $43,000 per violation per day.
Any health information that contains individual identifier that is used, maintained, stored, or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate is considered PHI regardless of its origin. The 18 identifiers that make health information PHI are:
It’s not only past and current health information that is covered under HIPAA. HIPAA also includes future information about medical conditions or physical and mental health that’s related to the provision of care or payment for care.
The only exception to HIPAA is when the health data collected is not on the behalf of a covered entity, such as heart rate data recorded by fitness trackers (see earlier section Does HIPAA Apply to My Health Tech App? for more details).
With Skyflow Data Privacy Vault as part of your architecture, you can better protect your patients’ PHI by preventing sensitive data from sprawling across your systems. When PHI is centralized, management and compliance become straightforward. Centrally enforce policies so only the right people and workflows can access sensitive data.
To learn how Skyflow helps companies like IBM protect billions of rows of clinical trial data, schedule a call with us.
HIPAA violations can range from civil penalties starting at $100 per violation to penalties for willful negligence that carry fines starting at $250,000, with the possibility of jail time. These fines might be accompanied by expensive and time-consuming corrective action plans, not to mention a reputation-damaging inclusion on the “HIPAA Wall of Shame.”
Some states and federal agencies have either banned or provided very strict guidelines for any Medicaid data to be stored or processed overseas. You can use Skyflow’s data residency features to keep PHI in the country it was collected to minimize risk, removing a potential layer of complexity.
There is no specific language in HIPAA that restricts the data residency of PHI and would forbid it from being stored or processed. You can use Skyflow’s data residency features to keep PHI in the country it was collected to minimize risk, removing a potential layer of complexity.
HIPAA is specifically applicable to PHI. But chances are if you’re handling PHI you’re likely handling personal identifiable information (PII) that falls within the scope of one of the consumer privacy laws in the US: California’s CCPA and its amendment, CPRA, Virginia’s VCDPA, Colorado’s ColoPA, and Utah’s UCPA.
Privacy regulation can feel like a lot to handle, even when these laws apply only to people who live in specific states. But fear not. If you take a privacy by design approach to handle all personal information, you can easily comply with existing and new privacy regulations from anywhere in the United States and beyond.
If your business is already aligned with HIPAA, maintaining compliance with other state privacy laws shouldn’t be too much hassle. Learn more about how Skyflow can help organizations of all sizes simplify and accelerate CCPA compliance.
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