HIPAA has gone turbulent by the year end of 2016 on law enforcement and is actively spotting any organization violating compliance. The figures are alarming as there has been a 300% rise in the fines collected since 2015. The year 2017 marks the enforcement actions for the breach, privacy, and security of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and there were nine settled compliance reviews with agreements of resolution. Moreover, in the above mentioned HIPAA law enforcement action an amount of $19.4 million in fines and penalties was collected by OCR.

The enforcement technique has undergone an important change of OCR without an extraction of fines for HIPAA violations. In numbers, such cases are approximately about 650 or more settled through an internal process in 2017 and determining HIPAA compliance uniformly. This process is practiced for those who fix the compliance through an internal process to streamline it in their organizations without attracting the enforcement actions. Such cases have improved about 8- 12% after 2016 in numbers as internal rectification is being administered by organizations to deflect the enforcement agency by practicing in compliance.

OCR HIPAA enforcement actions in the past year have made us learn an important lesson. The keen observation of their previous enforcement actions can be seen in a multitude of its purposes and of course to maintain compliance in accordance with HIPAA requirements.

With increasing force with which such audits are advancing, it is important to administer self-assessment in accordance with HIPAA compliance requirements to avert the repercussions of non-compliance. It is suggestive from the number of cases mentioned above who dodged the enforcement action and heavy penalties through an internal process to streamline compliance through internal security reviews of risk. Through this process, you can underline the fault in practice and amend it through corrective measures suggested by OCR. These measures encompass stress on the whole organization or company-wide data security risk analyses with the assistance of security rule to evaluate the risk and exposures.

However, the security rule requirements of HIPAA do not provide you with a certain plan of action through which you can perform the internal review. There are certain frameworks which can assist you to proceed and optimize in accordance with HIPAA security rule.

The other purpose is to be prepared in the scenario if any risk is discovered in the system so that the rectification is implemented as soon as possible. This ensures the system workflow and further control of an error reoccurrence.

Till now, you must have realized the various purposes of OCR HIPAA enforcement acts as it has another facet to ensure the possession of business associate agreements with vendors. This is an important aspect to ensure the PHI safeguards as in past year’s settlements suggest that the organizations unveiled PHI to contractors and vendors without safeguards. This resulted in a breach of privacy rule as individual PHI was revealed with permission. In HIPAA to maintain the privacy or PHI confidentiality, it is required to maintain a business associate agreement beforehand the vendor is creating or maintaining the PHI of any organization or entity. This binds the third party vendor to employ protective measure to ensure the safety of organizations PHI.

Below you can find the list of OCR HIPAA Enforcement Fines and Penalties of the year 2017:

The above data is clearly emphasizing to fill in the gaps in the system to effectively observe the HIPAA compliance. It depends on all the correlating factions working together such as healthcare providers, health plan administrators, and business associates to follow a process to analyze their working process to trace down the holes in the system and fix them. Through this self- analyzation and coordination, the organization can ensure the compliance, privacy rule, security rule, and confidentiality. This process not only saves you from HIPAA audits but also streamline the organizational process.