3 Reasons Why A HIPAA Compliant Outsourcing Partner Matters?

Maintaining the privacy of the patients’ data in the healthcare environment is challenging. Developing and administering security programs that are acceptable and practical using electronically protected health information (ePHI) requires extensive working experience.

These regulations are mainly defined in HIPAA compliance.

HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act. This is a federal law from 1996 meant to set standards for the protection of patient health data, ensuring that this information is never shared without their express knowledge.

Did you know that the average cost for a data breach was $3.8 million? That is why working with a billing or coding outsourcing partner that isn’t data compliant can be detrimental to your business in the long run. The same IBM report also divulges that healthcare is the most expensive industry when it comes to data breach costs, averaging out at about $7.13 million.’

This is why it is crucial to have an actionable security plan with clear direction, strong leadership, and a focus on data security.

And if you outsource any of the data functions to a third party, make sure that they have a robust understanding of HIPAA, efficient privacy function, and a risk-based, multifaceted approach to security.

Why HIPAA Compliance Matters?

Developing Internal Proficiency Is Challenging

Leveraging company resources to create and implement a high-quality HIPAA compliant team can be challenging, costly, and time-consuming. 

Enterprises new to the healthcare sector don’t always have the expertise needed to create and implement a HIPAA compliance program. This poses a threat to the security and safety of their patient’s confidential information.

From a healthcare standpoint, a HIPAA-compliant provider can better implement authentications and verifications to check an individual’s integrity and accessibility.

The regulations and control in the healthcare sector make it imperative to leverage multiple tools to achieve HIPAA compliance.

However, with a HIPAA-compliant outsourcing solution partner, their expert assistance and guidance can help you with the powerful tools without you having to spend money, time, and efforts to maintain standards and privacy.

Healthcare Security And Privacy

A HIPAA-compliant outsourcing partner can provide advanced, audited, and tested technology to help you maintain and follow the required compliance standards and effectively protect your patients’ sensitive data. 

Outsourcing a HIPAA-compliant partner also takes advantage of the enhanced security levels. Some of these benefits include environmental controls, physical security, video surveillance, logged access, and various alarm systems to identify unauthorized access.

The HIPAA compliance procedure in healthcare involves both ongoing work and one-off projects. This requires most companies to spend a considerable amount of time and money to ensure accurate compliance management.

A HIPAA compliant outsourcing partner is paramount to help you accurately assess, test, correct, upgrade and modify internal controls, which can be otherwise a genuinely daunting and time-consuming process, especially when done by in-house teams.

Without a HIPAA-compliant outsourcing service provider, you will have to train your employees to have adequate knowledge in regulatory compliance to ensure data security and privacy.

A compliant outsourcing partner will routinely provide internal controls testing and deliver transparent and concise reports to the management. They will also structure and execute an efficient workflow process for HIPAA auditors.

Business Continuity And Growth

Finally, when you partner with a third-party expert that is HIPAA compliant, they can help you with business continuity and growth by offloading the burden and distraction of creating, managing, and maintaining HIPAA compliance on your own. This also enables you to ensure that your patients’ information is safe and protected.

In response to increasing customer pressure and regulations to protect patient data, companies are outsourcing their HIPAA compliance to third-party security firms in healthcare privacy. This helps deliver high-quality results, efficiency, and continuous data protection, letting you focus on your strategic growth initiatives.

Working with a HIPAA-compliant outsourcing partner enables business continuity by redirecting your resources to creating and operating operations successfully. At the same time, the provider focuses on securing and safeguarding your patients’ information.

Your outsourcing service provider connects with your business associates on different functions in the best partnerships, ranging from addressing customer security questionnaires to developing a long-term and sustainable security roadmap that aligns with the company objectives and overall plan.

The result of this strategic partnership is that you can build a vital security infrastructure to protect the sensitive information and data of patients from unauthorized users.

Healthcare organizations breathe and live compliance and security. So outsourcing a HIPAA-compliant provider for your patient communications elevates all the compliance best practices.

In the realm of data protection and compliance, your company’s print, mails, medical billing, etc., need a Compliance and Security Officer tending to related functions. You can also outsource medical billing, medical coding, and more to ensure secure processes.

Collaborate With A HIPAA Compliant Outsourcing Partner

With the acceleration in digital transformation, specifically in healthcare, it is essential to efficiently manage massive amounts of protected health information. This is where healthcare outsourcing comes in.

Overseeing these regulations in-house can be a challenge for many firms. Outsourcing cybersecurity programs and HIPAA compliance to a privacy expert can help you effectively augment your patients’ data security.

This, in turn, allows you to reduce costs, meet customer demands, protect patients’ data and most importantly, emphasize internal resources on valuable business aspects– serving customers and growing businesses.

As a healthcare provider, it is paramount to mature your cybersecurity programs and HIPAA compliance by outsourcing your functions to a responsible and credible partner.

PRO TIP: High Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score helps businesses gauge the quality of the customer service offered by outsourcing companies. Organisations can use NPS to assess which outsourcing service is best to partner with because this score shows loyalty trends and growth revenue outputs.

In a way, NPS represents the primary way customers survey their experience because it means that their clients are happy which results in customer loyalty and retention, making this a critical trait a BPO company should have. When used correctly, NPS (of at least 60%) can tell you how well the BPO is performing, how often they resolve issues, and if their clients are satisfied with their experience.

All these qualities and more can be found with the right outsourcing partner who can provide a customized, high quality healthcare business solutions that can promise for the following:

• Operational excellence
• Build a great healthcare & RCM team specifically designed for your unique needs
• Operational cost savings of up to 70%
• Information and data security
• Sense of security and peace of mind

Partnership with Infinit-O

Infinit-O’s mission is to create endless opportunities for your company to realize its full potential.

We can build you a great, high-performance Revenue Cycle Management team composed of:

Patient Support Services

• Patient Concierge Specialist
•  Insurance Verification Specialist
• Collections Specialist
• A/R Specialist

Provider Management Services

• Medical Coders
• Medical Billers
• Claims Processors
• Enrollment Processors
• Denial Management Specialist

Health Analytics and Risk Management Services

• Healthcare Analyst

Others

Start small. Exceed expectations. Think infinitely. Think Infinit-O.