A documents management system in the HITRUST CSF context has significant implications for healthcare facilities and their providers.
Document management systems are one of today’s farthest reaching technologies; not just in terms of its expansion over North America, but also in terms of the impact it can have within organizations and departments—an impact felt in the effects of improved bottom line, easier operations, and the security to help business administrators in healthcare clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities tend to the tasks requiring their human skill sets.
Although it’s stigmatized to call the industry of healthcare a business, that’s exactly what it is, and therefore, it’s not immune to modern business processes.
The Health Information Trust Alliance certification, more commonly referred to as ‘HITRUST Certification,’ is oftentimes confused with HIPAA compliance.
In this article, we’ll delineate between the two, but also encourage you to use the link above to refer you to further HIPAA guidelines as they are relevant to document management.
Understanding the HITRUST Framework
Unlike other certification programs, the HITRUST has a framework to be applied in healthcare clinics and in hospitals alike.
In other words, it doesn’t provide a certification framework for human beings so much as it does for the healthcare facilities in which they practice medicine.
The documents management system in the HITRUST CSF context both explains and resolves some of the most difficult issues the framework is designed to address.
How the HITRUST CSF (Common Security Framework) Applies to Document Management
Understanding a documents management system in the HITRUST CSF context requires acknowledging the importance of information in healthcare clinics at the level of documentation.
With scrum teams working to address ever-changing security needs in the healthcare industry via software development, they look to how the HITRUST CSF will evolve over time, and the role technology will play in simplifying compliance to the standard.
Since documents are not just pieces of paper in the healthcare industry, but rather stores of valuable patient data and confidential information (which pose significant fines under the circumstances of a data breach), it’s safe to say they are valuable.
Some economists would even go so far as to say a “store of value” is a technical term for legal tender. From this perspective, it makes sense that healthcare practitioners are beginning to take common security frameworks for documentation seriously.
Keep reading to see how a documents management system can help simplify HITRUST CSF measures for your contract nursing business, healthcare clinic, or other healthcare facility.
Honest Self-assessment
An internal self-assessment is oftentimes needed for healthcare facilities. Better to discover a problem internally and have it fixed than it is to have a regulating authority discover it before the healthcare facility team does.
The cost of using systems embedded with the proper security measures is always worth it: If you think compliance is expensive, you’ll be even less thrilled by the costs of noncompliance.
Not only can the latter of these scenarios cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fines, it can cost a healthcare facility its reputation, and those losses can be severely incalculable, albeit measurably injurious to financial outcomes.
The audit trail feature, which is an extremely valuable component of most documents management systems in the HITRUST CSF context, makes it far quicker and easier to conduct a self-assessment of information, precluding the many downfalls that could occur without such technology features in place.
Password Management in Data Security
ePHI (electronic public health information) standards are beginning to intensify, and certain authentication factors for password management are one of the most immediate measures.
A two-factor password authentication, which will soon be championed by the best documents management system vendors, will play a significant and far reaching role in upholding data security standards within the healthcare industry, and in measuring up to the standards of HITRUST CSF.
This will ring especially true as data security decrypting becomes more advanced. Having the major measures in place to help and assist with password protection will prove extremely helpful.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Although this applies to more than the healthcare information management system, it is relevant to HITRUST CSF because it evaluates controls of healthcare merchants designed to prevent unauthorized use. It’s one of the foremost measures of authentication at work in the healthcare industry.
PCI DSS is relevant to document management because of the first level of the standard, which also applies to HITRUST CSF standards.
The first level of PCI DSS was devised for the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) 27001 standard, which accounting and financial services authorities within healthcare systems are most responsible for.
The asset management component of the healthcare field is becoming more closely examined by regulators of the industry, and secure portal clouds of a documents management system in the HITRUST CSF context help stave off further red tape, provided they are embedded via protocol into all existing procedures.
To learn more about the documents management system in the HITRUST CSF context, fill out our form bar or call in to speak with a business efficiency expert today.