HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, is an important law for anyone in the healthcare field. While the title of the law may give you the impression that the law is mostly about taking your insurance with you if you change jobs, the law does a lot of other things.

For example, it issues a clear set of patient rights and privacy standards that every medical facility in the United States must follow, or face serious fines or jail time for violation.

When it comes to combining medicine and technology, the HIPAA law can present a very real set of security challenges that must be adhered to, and extra steps must be taken to prevent the personal data of patients from being accessed by those people who have no need of it. After all, individuals’ medical records need to be accessible to care providers, but we travel a lot more than people in previous generations and most of us don’t carry around a medical history with us.

In order to give care professionals what they need and make treatment as efficient as possible, many organizations are turning to record sharing on the cloud, which means picking a provider very carefully.

This week, one company, Green House Data, has announced that it is now in compliance with the HIPAA law. Since the government does not do direct audits of the systems, the company had to have this fact verified by an independent company – in this case it was Linford and Co.

The analysis showed that the company was in fact compliant with all 54 of the known citations, and 136 audited components.

The company seemed happy about the news, and Shawn Mills, president of Green House Data, had the following to say about the announcement: "The healthcare world is truly exploding in terms of data migration and getting their mountains of imaging, patient data, etc. into the digital space. Though we've had the extra security measures and procedures in place, we are thrilled to have the official attestation of HIPAA compliancy so that our company can be a bigger part of the massive growth happening in that sector.”

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