Few industries come under as much scrutiny from government and industry oversight than insurance. Compliance is a major concern and something that all providers, agents, and brokers need to stay on top of and constantly maintain. There are many facets to compliance, with record-keeping being a major part. Paperwork is the lifeblood of the industry and it’s paramount that it is filed and organized correctly in order to stay compliant.
Depending on how large your company’s record room is, you likely have a full-time compliance officer that handles this sort of thing. For medium to small companies, a full-time position to worry about compliance may not be in the cards, and it falls to you and a handful of others. Here are just a few out of many compliance standards that insurance companies need to abide by.
Regulations That DMS Helps You Stay Compliant With
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA): Established in 1999, this regulation is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. Financial institutions and insurance companies are required to disclose their information sharing practices and to safeguard sensitive data.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX): Established in 2002, and formalized standards for auditing and reporting required by publically held companies and financial institutions.
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): Established in 1996, its goal was to improve insurance availability and certain patient rights, namely privacy. For record-keeping purposes, HIPAA dictates that organizations with access to a client/patient’s health-related information are responsible for safeguarding it, keeping it private, and sharing it in a responsible manner with other authorized entities.
Compliance and Document Management
Violating compliance can result in steep consequences for your business. The end result is usually thousands of dollars in fines and a big hit to your company’s reputation. So how does restructuring your current filing system with new tech help? Document management software is more than file storage – it gives you the necessary tools to easily organize your records in a way that keeps you compliant with just about any compliant standard with rules on electronic storage. It also contains helpful tools to make certain aspects of compliance easier to abide by.
Role-Based Permissions: This feature allows you to keep certain folders and documents private and accessible to only authorized users. Having it be role-based makes onboarding new users much more efficient and helps ensure no one will mistakenly be given access to private files.
Versioning/Audit Access: Documents of great importance that contain pertinent client information needs to come attached with a version history that details when the document was created, who has had access to it, what changes have been made. It must also list who made the changes and when.
Luckily, document management automatically records everything that happens to documents within the system. You can view and download a comprehensive audit report of any document or the entire system. Furthermore, versioning allows you to revisit a previous version of the document to see exactly what changes were made to the document.
Encrypted Sharing: The use of encryption when storing and sharing electronic documents with sensitive information is crucial to stay compliant. Simply emailing a file or using an instant messenger application flys in the face of security standards and could land you in big trouble.
An encrypted, file-sharing portal is needed in order to securely share files across the web. Not only that, but certain regulations require you to utilize a standard encryption type – usually 256-bit AES with SSL/TLS.
Rubex by eFileCabinet provides all of these and many more security and compliance features. It’s the best tool to ensure your business can easily stay in line with compliance standards without expending more labor hours than you need to. To see Rubex in action, click here to schedule a free, personalized demo.
