In the world of technologies and applications, the Healthcare industry is not behind. From making a doctor’s appointment in buying medicines online, there are various healthcare apps present. And for creating such healthcare software for the US market, HIPAA is the most critical legislation.
If you provide healthcare mobile app development services like Riseapps, mentioned above, and planning to build a HIPAA Compliant Healthcare App, there are numerous things that you need to know. And to help you understand every aspect of this, we’ll start from scratch to learn everything required.
What exactly is HIPAA?
HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which was developed in 1996 to protect patients’ data, reduce the rates of healthcare, and provide health insurance to such people who have lost their jobs or are changing their positions.
Well, nowadays, as everything can be done over smartphones using different apps, so all the apps that involve sending or receiving private data should be HIPAA compliant.
To develop a healthcare application, the first thing that you should find is the type of information you’ll be storing and transferring through it. So, there are two types of data:
- Protected Health Information (PHI): this includes medical bills, blood test results, and any medical information of a person.
- Consumer Health Information (CHI): this consists of the information received via fitness tracker like heart rate readings, calories burned, etc.
So, if the healthcare app that you are building involves any PHI data, then it needs to be HIPAA compliant.
How can you make your application HIPAA compliant?
To do so, you need to follow the main four rules:
- Privacy Rule
- Security Rule
- Enforcement Rule
- Breach Notification Rule
Out of these rules, the essential practice for developers who make the healthcare app is the Security rule because it makes sure that there are necessary outlines for physical, technical, and administrative safeguards that secure electronically protected health information.
To build a secure HIPAA compliant app, you need to encrypt the data in your developed software and make sure that it is not accessible if there is any physical compromisation with the servers or device.
Apart from this, you need to use reliable providers, right technical tools, and third-party services to create a fully secured app. You may also want to avoid sending PHI in notifications.
Steps to create a HIPAA Compliant Healthcare App
To ensure that you make a successful HIPAA compliant Healthcare app, you can follow the given steps:
Step 1: Hire an expert for proper guidance
Before building your healthcare app, you need to meet all HIPAA requirements, and for that, you need to get real advice, which you can get only from an expert. It doesn’t matter if you are a startup or have a significant healthcare company; you need to find and hire an expert who can consult and audit your system.
Step 2: Assess the patient data
You also need to make sure that whatever data you are collecting from patients is required. Also, note the PHI data and evaluate what information you can avoid to store and transfer through your app.
Step 3: Search for right HIPAA compliant third-party solutions
If you try to develop a HIPAA compliant app from scratch, it can cost you a considerable amount. The better way is to use existing infrastructure and solutions for a third-party, HIPAA compliant like Amazon Web Services. This will save you a lot of money, time, and effort. But make sure that they are reliable and trustworthy.
Step 4: Encrypt stored and transferred data
To make sure that the data of your patients are secured, you need to use all the best practices for encrypting all the data. Also, check that there are no security breaches, and the data stored is protected from being stolen.
Step 5: Test the developed app
The last thing to do is take a test for the developed HIPAA compliant Healthcare app because you have to make sure that everything is perfect. Also, make sure to have proper maintenance and updating of the application.
Well, we are now at te end of the article, and everything that you needed to know about building a HIPAA compliant Healthcare app is covered in this article. For more we recommend you the article with HIPAA compliance checklist from Riseapps.