In the US, all medical facilities, doctors, nurses, and other so-called "covered entities" as well as everyone who works directly or indirectly with those entities (so-called "business associates") have to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule for handling protected health information (PHI). The purpose of the Security Rule is to avoid breaches of patient data, and non-compliance can result in stiff fines. The HIPAA Security Rule obliges health service providers to implement the following safeguards in their organizations:
Technical safeguards that impose healthcare software standards
Physical safeguards that cover physical access to ePHI
Administrative safeguards, which entail organizational data protection measures
We cover all HIPAA requirements in greater detail in our article on how to become HIPAA-compliant. Maintaining compliance is critical, as non-compliance may lead to large penalties and harm a company’s reputation. For instance, in 2020, the Washington state-based health insurance company Premera Blue Cross paid $6.8 million for leaking ePHI of 10.4 million individuals.
Each country has its own set of laws to ensure healthcare data privacy. In this post, we’ll compare HIPAA with health data regimes in Canada, the UK, Australia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and Qatar. If you want to enter these markets with your healthcare software, our article will be especially relevant for you. The table below shows commonalities and differences in healthcare data privacy requirements between these countries.
Brian Brinkmann posted a topic in the forum Off-Topic Discussions: