Government to make HIPAA compliance rules easier to grasp

HIPAA compliance

The U.S. government is ready to act, to make it easier for mHealth developers to have their apps HIPAA compliant.

The initiative started last fall when members of Congress, at the request of The App Association, wrote a letter to the Office of Civil Rights — the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) office that administers and enforces HIPAA privacy rules — asking it to issue clearer guidelines for app makers.

The Office of Civil Rights has already held several meetings with The App Association.The other day, the Office of Civil Rights promised to do just that in a letter to Representative Peter DeFazio. Said letter even included a note that the Office made a mistake for not clearing out many of the things related to HIPAA compliance.

Existing guidelines are outdated, according to Morgan Reed, director of The App Association, which represents some 50,000 app developers and IT companies. And hospitals as extremely risk-averse organization will not do business with companies whose technology might not be compliant, making it hard for startups to win new customers.

To kick things off, the Office of Civil Rights has already held several meetings with The App Association. They pledged to be more responsive and active in providing guidelines, even proposing a series of “listening sessions” where the agency would hear directly from the tech companies about the compliance problems they’re facing.

On the hand, The App Association is calling on its member base to provide details on compliance problems and case studies. Once everything is properly documented, we expect to get a better set of guidelines and more prosperous digital health economy in turn. Good days ahead…

[Via: VentureBeat]