Contents
- Introduction to HIPAA and ePHI
- 6 Checklists Features to Ponder for a HIPAA Compliant Website
- How to Make Your WordPress HIPAA Compliant?
- 7 Major Features for HIPAA-Compliant WordPress Hosting
- How to Choose a Secure and Authentic HIPAA WordPress Hosting Service Provider?
- Major Advantages Leveraging HIPAA WordPress Hosting Provider
- Top HIPAA WordPress Hosting Service Providers
Introduction to HIPAA and ePHI
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a critical law passed by the United States Congress in 1996. It allows all US employees and their families to maintain health insurance coverage and prevents abuse or fraud within the healthcare industry. In addition, the law also introduced some standards for healthcare data, especially mandating that all healthcare patient data should be safeguarded appropriately and exclusively its privacy should be maintained by the healthcare provider, denoted as Protected Health Information (PHI).
This shows that the patient’s electronically identifiable health information (ePHI) that contains any identifiable material related to a patient’s healthcare, such as a patient’s name, location or address of the patient, months and dates of patient services, or events, any telephone numbers, any patient Fax numbers, Social Security numbers, ID numbers, Car tags, Photographs, or and any other features that are directly related to the patient need to be protected
and maintained.
For businesses with WordPress websites dealing with patient’s healthcare data or handling healthcare in any capacity or similar companies, HIPAA-Compliant web hosting should be at the top of your list. Any failure to comply with the HIPAA act to protect PHI will result in critical penalties to businesses and could mean jail time or a fine of up to $55,000 for the violation. This shows that HIPAA-Compliant WordPress hosting should be on your mind. Thus, businesses that deal with the collection, transmission, and storing of ePHI on and through their website need to be HIPAA compliant.
6 Checklists Features to Ponder for a HIPAA Compliant Website
The standard WordPress (Leading Content Management System) is, by default, not HIPAA compliant as WordPress does not support any HIPAA-Compliant services. Hence, businesses should leverage top HIPAA WordPress hosting providers to get HIPPA Compliant and safeguard the electronic capture and transmission of ePHI, thus ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability of ePHI. Therefore, businesses should ponder the checklist below for a HIPPA Compliant website.
- For healthcare and related businesses, ensuring all the website content and other activities performed within the website are HIPAA compliant is crucial.
- It is essential to check the website’s security and ensure all security features are in place to protect the ePHI information.
- Businesses need to ensure that the PHI is securely stored and transferred to the required resource whenever required.
- Your WordPress website should be checked and tested occasionally, leveraging security testing to ensure no threats and vulnerabilities, and if any are identified should be resolved by adopting remedial measures.
- Businesses should also ensure that ePHI data is collected only for legitimate purposes.
Further, they should ensure that third-party services, if any used, are also compliant with HIPAA regulations.
How to Make Your WordPress HIPAA Compliant?
- Perform a risk analysis using the site in connection with any ePHI information access and reduce risks.
- Leverage a HIPAA Compliant hosting service provider for your WordPress website hosting to ensure all access, integrity, and audit controls are in place.
- Adopt security testing should be taken up to ensure no threats and vulnerabilities.
- Leverage and use only trustworthy plugins and also install security plugins.
- Ensure to set and use strong passwords to reduce cyber-attacks and set two-factor authentication for admin and supervisor accounts.
- Primarily ensure that data collected via web forms should be encrypted and transmitted only.
- Ensure ePHI is stored outside of WordPress and use forms to collect PHI
- Ensure to get Business Associate agreements with all service providers or plugin developers who would have access to ePHI.
From the above list, it is clear that businesses getting WordPress HIPAA Compliant involves a little complicated process and should leverage top HIPAA-compliant Web hosting service providers.
Top Features for HIPAA-Compliant WordPress Hosting
- Install firewalls, and it is essential to install advanced firewalls.
- Multi-factor authentication.
- Encrypted virtual private networks (VPN) to secure cloud access.
- Malware scanning and security testing should be taken up for security monitoring.
- Secure server locations in HIPAA-approved data centers should be used.
- Server availability and 100% uptime is essential.
- A Content Delivery Network to serve the content of users from different locations.
- Data backup with data recovery resistance is essential.
How to Choose a Secure and Authentic HIPAA WordPress Hosting Service Provider?
- Choose a HIPAA Compliant WordPress provider who follows all the security standards and other regulations required for HIPAA compliance.
- Pick up a service provider that offers advanced firewalls, security, proper encryption, malware scanning, and backups.
- Check the number of years of experience of the HIPAA WordPress hosting provider and the more years; the better will be the service.
- Evaluate the pricing models and choose a provider with excellent and affordable plans.
- Check if the hosting provider enables HIPAA WordPress-specific hosting.
- Look for the advanced infrastructure of the HIPAA WordPress hosting service provider and then choose the one with advanced features.
Major Advantages Leveraging HIPAA WordPress Hosting Provider
By choosing a top and secure HIPAA WordPress hosting provider, businesses get many benefits, such as:
- Using a HIPAA WordPress hosting provider ensures you comply with HIPAA regulations and protects your businesses from any penalties.
- Enforces enhanced security measures such as SSL encryption, access controls, and malware protection and protects your PHI data.
- These providers ensure a secured server, and 99.99% reliable uptime and performance.
- With their years of experience, they ensure HIPAA Compliant Websites.
- They provide effective cost savings as your business need not invest in a secure hosting environment.
Top HIPAA WordPress Hosting Service Providers
- Atlantic.Net: It is the leading, secure, trusted, and tested web hosting provider, specializing in HIPAA and PCI Cloud Server Hosting. Atlantic.Net is a top HIPAA WordPress hosting provider with over 29 years of reliable market presence as a secure and reliable hosting partner for numerous small, medium, and large enterprises. They provide an excellent cloud platform for Bio-Tech, Pharma, and various Universities backed by world-class data center infrastructure for HIPAA readiness.
The company offers hosting services, including cloud, dedicated, colocation, private virtualization, and managed hosting. Their infrastructure is fully audited and compliant with HIPAA and HITECH and adheres to SSAE 18 (formerly SSAE 16) SOC from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. They assist by creating customized solutions that fit your business goals. Businesses can get the best HIPAA WordPress hosting from Atlantic .Net.
Highlights of Atlantic.Net – The Top HIPAA WordPress Server Hosting
- The company’s state-of-the-art infrastructure is SSAE 18, HIPAA, and HITECH compliant and housed in secure, climate-controlled facilities with constant monitoring and multiple direct connections to the internet backbone to ensure the availability and safety of your data.
- Fully managed servers with high availability infrastructure
- Advanced firewalls with secured encryptions.
- They provide the best HIPAA-compliant cloud storage servers with centralized access control while providing adequate monitoring and logging.
- 24x7x365 monitoring by third-party security.
- The company signs Business Associate Agreements and has been named the Best HIPAA Platform Provider for four years.
- Also were awarded the Best Patient Data Security Solution award in 2019.
- They provide business-class, dedicated, top-notch cloud hosting solutions backed by 24/7/365 support through their global data centers in New York, London, San Francisco, Toronto, Dallas, Ashburn, and Orlando.
- Amazon AWS: It is a secure hosting provider, and its sharing solution allows users to store data. Their hosting services also provide data backup and prevent any unauthorized data access.
- Microsoft Azure: It is a leading managed hosting provider offering virtual private servers and effective cloud hosting with dedicated servers for making WordPress servers. The company provides managed services, such as seamless server monitoring, reliable security, and adequate backups. Its cloud hosting services are scalable and flexible, with expert WordPress support and automated backups.
- Rackspace: Provides cloud computing and managed hosting services providers. Its services range from server hosting to cloud-based infrastructure and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider. In addition, the company provides security and server hosting, effective performance and scalability, secure data storage, and backups.
- FlyWheel: The company offers managed hosting services for WordPress hosting with dedicated servers. It provides various services such as malware scanning, performance optimization, uptime monitoring, automated backups, and restores.