+HIPAA and doQuments

HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. HIPAA is a federal guideline that aims to ensure that patient information and records are protected and maintain their integrity.

The US government passed the act on August 21, 1996. President Bush decided to allow the rule to take effect on April 14, 2001. HIPAA required effected entities to comply within two years i.e. by April 14, 2003.

Under HIPAA a patient has the right to access his or her own medical records. Patients can request to view or get copies of their records, request modifications to the records and request a listing of disclosures of their protected information.

In addition to this HIPAA privacy regulations control how and when protected patient information can be shared by physicians and administrative staff.

HIPAA will also help bring down medical administrative costs and improve the healthcare delivery effectiveness.

doQuments is a document management software which allows an organization to...

• Create a secure, centralized and searchable repository of all it's paper and electronic documents.
• Selectively control a user's access to the repository
• Record details about a user's access to the repository

The covered organization is responsible for HIPAA compliance and not the vendor. In fact there is no such thing as a HIPAA compliant software or hardware (despite the claims of some companies). To be compliant organizations must satisfy the intent of the law. They must have the mechanism in place that guarantees safe electronic storage, access and transmission of patient records.

It is organizations not technology that must be HIPAA compliant. However technology can be used to help the organization in it's efforts to be HIPAA compliant.

The use of doQuments itself will not be enough for an organization to be HIPAA compliant. doQuments as a document management software helps with the management and security of patient records - which is a big component of HIPAA. However it is important to note that there are aspects of HIPAA which are beyond the scope of a document management software (for e.g. having a dedicated employee as the "HIPAA compliance officer").

Organizations who wish to be HIPAA compliant can use doQuments to take important steps towards that goal.

• Capture patients records (both stored on paper and those stored in electronic files)
• Set up a access control mechanism for these records
• Quickly search and find these records

doQuments lets you store indexing information along with each document or for a set of documents. Indexing information is stored in data fields. You can create up to 200 data fields for storing indexing information. Data fields can store text, numeric, date, time and Boolean (Yes/No) values. You can create fields such Patient Name, Address etc.

This indexing information can later be used to quickly find and retrieve records for a patient or a group of patients.

doQuments Enterprise Edition features a powerful and flexible multi-level security framework. doQuments requires the user to login before he or she can get access to the documents and their indexing data. This ensures that only authenticated users known to the system get access to patient records.

doQuments lets you specify access permissions on a user by user basis. For example you can decide that.

doQuments security is so flexible that you can even specify that a user can only view particular records, documents or particular indexing fields!

Documents added to doQuments can be optionally stored in encrypted form for additional security. Any of the industry standard encryption algorithms supported by doQuments can be used to encrypt the documents.

The security features help you comply with HIPAA rules which state that an organization must protect patients records against unauthorized access or modifications.

Using this feature an organization can keep track of every action a user perform with doQuments. For example you can find out.

When a particular user logged in?
What records/documents were viewed by the user?
When was a particular document added and by whom?

This feature helps you comply with HIPAA rules which state that information about each disclosure of a patient record must be available.

For more information about doQuments Enterprise Edition click here.

For pricing ordering/pricing information about doQuments Enterprise Edition click here.

If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact us at support@itaz.com