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HIPAA

Rachel Cheyfitz
  • Updated

 

Regulation: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Abbreviation: HIPAA
Governs these parties: all organizations that: receive payment for 
their services and transmit personal or health information for the 
purposes of treatment, operations, billing, or insurance coverage
Enforced by: the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 
Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid 
Services (CMS), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and the 
Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

HIPAA is a series of regulatory standards that outline the lawful use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI). PHI includes private information such as past, present, or future physical or mental health or conditions, health care, past, present, or future payments for health care, and personal identifying information such as birthdates, social security numbers, and biometric information. Included in the regulations is the requirement for the security of electronically protected health information (e-PHI), which is all private data that is created, received, maintained, or transmitted in electronic form.

The rest of this document is designed to help our community understand HIPAA better by outlining the following information:

How it relates to cybersecurity

HIPAA comprises privacy, security, and breach notification rules. The Security Rule establishes a national set of security standards for protecting certain health information that is held or transferred in electronic form. Much of the technical safeguards described are cybersecurity guardrails, and as such require that your electronic data be monitored and protected by a security platform.

The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) offers an audit protocol that can be used as a roadmap when planning and ensuring your and your customer's data is protected.

How Coro handles compliance for you

At Coro, we've done the research thoroughly and regularly track updates to the regulation in order to ensure that you are implementing best practices in the areas we cover when we're protecting your systems.

The following table outlines the requirements described by HIPAA that Coro implements in conjunction with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

Disclaimer: this table does not guarantee that your organization is compliant with these regulations. As a best practice, seek assistance from a certified auditor when completing your analysis.

Category

Requirement

How Coro does it

Cloud Security & Privacy

 

 

 

Malware and ransomware injection

Detects and remediates malware and ransomware files in cloud drives

Cloud app account takeover

Monitors access to cloud apps and user/admin activities on them

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) 

Enforces multi-factor authentication on cloud app access

Audit and activity logs

Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing

Email Security & Privacy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Generic and spear phishing

Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on email content analysis

Identity spoofing

Detects and remediates social engineering attacks based on adaptive identity monitoring

Malware and ransomware injection

Detects and remediates malware and ransomware in email attachments

Embedded links to malicious URLs

Detects and remediates embedded links to malicious servers

DLP over outgoing/incoming email

Encrypts emails before they are sent, which are then decrypted by their recipients at the other end.

Encryption of email during transmission

Encrypts email during transit between the sender and the recipient

Business email compromise (BEC)

Scans business email, detects and protects against social engineering attacks

Audit and activity logs

Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing

Endpoint Security & Privacy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antivirus (AV)

Detects and remediates files with high-risk content based on their signatures

ATP (NGAV)

Detects and remediates processes exhibiting high-risk behaviors with behavioral analysis

Device security posture

Detects security vulnerabilities on endpoint devices and enforces device security posture

Data recovery

Stores local snapshots of data

EDR

Enables post-breach analysis of endpoint activities across the organization

DLP on endpoint devices

Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for business-sensitive data and data defined as sensitive by regulations

Audit and activity logs

Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing

Data Governance

 

 

 

Data distribution governance and role management

Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for data defined as sensitive by regulations

Security and business-specific data monitoring

Monitors for sensitive data according to business and security best practices, including passwords, certificates, source code, proprietary data, etc.

PHI monitoring

Monitors PHI (also: personal health information) that healthcare professionals collect to identify an individual and determine appropriate care

Audit and activity logs

Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing

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