HIPAA

Learn about achieving HIPAA compliance on Aptible

Overview

Aptible’s story began with a focus on serving digital health companies. As a result, the Aptible platform was designed with HIPAA compliance in mind. It automates and enforces all the necessary infrastructure security and compliance controls, ensuring the safe storage and processing of HIPAA-protected health information and more.

Achieving HIPAA on Aptible

1

Provision a Dedicated Stack to run your resources

Dedicated Stacks live on isolated infrastructure and are designed to support deploying resources with higher requirements— such as HIPAA. Aptible automates and enforces 100% of the necessary infrastructure security and compliance controls for HIPAA compliance.

2

Execute a HIPAA BAA with Aptible

When you request your first dedicated stack, an Aptible team member will reach out to coordinate the execution of a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).

Show off your compliance

The Security & Compliance Dashboard and reporting serves as a great resource for showing off HIPAA compliance. When a Dedicated Stack is provisioned, the HIPAA required controls will show as 100% - by default.

Understanding the HIPAA Readiness Score

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that dictates US standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued the HIPAA Privacy Rule to implement the requirements of HIPAA. The HIPAA Security Rule protects a subset of information covered by the Privacy Rule.

The Aptible Security & Compliance Dashboard provides a HIPAA readiness score based on controls required for meeting the minimum standards of the regulation, labeled HIPAA Required, as well as addressable controls that are not required to meet the specifications of the regulation but are recommended as a good security practice, labeled HIPAA Addressable.

HIPAA Required Score

HIPAA prescribes certain implementation specifications as “required, “meaning you must implement the control to meet the regulation requirements. An example of such a specification is 164.308(a)(7)(ii)(A), requiring implemented procedures to create and maintain retrievable exact copies of ePHI. You can meet this specification with Aptible’s automated daily backup creation and retention policy.

The HIPAA Required score gives you a binary indicator of whether or not you’re meeting the required specifications under the regulation. By default, all resources hosted on a Dedicated Stack meet the required specifications of HIPAA, so if you plan on processing ePHI, it’s a good idea to host your containers on a Dedicated Stack from day 1.

HIPAA Addressable Score

The HHS developed the concept of “addressable implementation specifications” to provide covered entities and business associates additional flexibility regarding compliance with HIPAA. In meeting standards that contain addressable implementation specifications, a covered entity or business associate will do one of the following for each addressable specification:

• Implement the addressable implementation specifications;
• Implement one or more alternative security measures to accomplish the same purpose;
• Not implement either an addressable implementation specification or an alternative.

The HIPAA Addressable score tells you what percentage of infrastructure controls you have implemented successfully to meet relevant addressable specifications per HIPAA guidelines.

Add a Secured by Aptible badge and link to the Secured by Aptible page to show all the security & compliance controls implemented..