HIPAA Compliance through Serial ATA

What is HIPAA Compliance? It is not only a centralized software combined with document input solutions and digital imaging. It’s more of a legal undertaking to digitize critical medical files in auditable, readily accessible and standard formats. HIPAA Compliance is mainly a library of storage that is secured to serve and achieve billions of files. As regulated by the government, health care IT professionals and other holders of medical information are required to safeguard all the information and to document these details. The government specifies patient information that must be kept private, ways on how to safeguard the information and standardized ways of electronic communication between the insurance companies and health care providers.

Who are required under HIPAA Compliance? Organizations considered to be covered under HIPAA vary from health care organization such as claims clearing houses, providers, insurance companies, etc. Another organization required under HIPAA is categorized as hybrid entities such as employee health plans managed in house or university with teaching hospitals. The last category is the business associate of a covered entity; this can be a person who assists or performs data analysis, utilization reviews or claims processing.

All these health care organizations are required by HIPAA to secure every patient’s PHI or protected health information. But the differing ways which PHI can enter a secured entity, the ranging record formats and contents, the desire to protect, store and recover PHI and the declining IT budgets and strict scrutiny of medical costs collectively creates a strong demand for a fast, reliable, flexible, scalable and inexpensive storage technology.

One solution found to meet these requirements is the serial IO Technologies or SATA.  It has several features which makes it the right technology for HIPAA Compliance while answering the business requirements of an IT infrastructure. SATA is designed to give savings and improved scalability through its point-to-point interface protocol. It also provides data protection features like signal integrity, hot plug capability, lower voltage requirements, integration based on reduced pin count, improved connector plants and cable. Each device is connected to the host via a direct link. The device therefore has a full bandwidth dedicated to each device and there’s no interaction between each devices. The overhead connected with accesses between master and slave devices are therefore eliminated.

The current models of SATA run at 150 MB/sec data rate. The second set will run at 300 MB/sec.; next is 600 MB/sec. and so on. Aside from SATA, HIPAA Compliance will also require RAID or Redundant Array of Independent Disks technology. This can be a part of a storage system with random data access that includes magnetic hard drives, magnetic tapes or optical storage. RAID also allows recovery of lost data and redundancy of data to be predetermined and its level. RAID storage gives data in readily accessible formats similar to what is being provided by SATA.

With all the features of RAID and SATA, these technologies can be a realistic remedy to the problems relative to HIPAA Compliance. Although this is efficient, the challenge remains for any organization to identify the requirements to comply with any regulations. The organizations should also know the most efficient technology to meet the requirements constantly.

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