We are excited to announce that VetRec is now HIPAA compliant! You can trust VetRec to handle patient care information, ensuring the highest of standards both in security and privacy.

In this blog post we’ll go over what is HIPAA and the rationale for doing this.

What is HIPAA?

HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a critical piece of legislation enacted in 1996 in the United States. Designed to safeguard individuals’ medical information, HIPAA sets standards for the protection and confidential handling of sensitive health data. Its primary goal is to ensure the privacy and security of patients’ health information while also allowing for the efficient flow of healthcare data when necessary. HIPAA compliance is crucial for healthcare providers, health plans, and any other entities that handle protected health information (PHI). Adhering to HIPAA regulations not only helps maintain patient trust but also mitigates the risks associated with data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive medical records.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/publications/topic/hipaa.html

To ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations, companies handling protected health information (PHI) must implement robust security measures to safeguard sensitive data. Access controls are critical, requiring strict authentication mechanisms such as passwords, biometrics, or multi-factor authentication to restrict access to PHI to authorized personnel only. In addition to all this, regular security and audit assessments are needed as well as employee training to make sure the company is up-to-date and adhering to the latest standards.

Furthermore, companies who are HIPAA compliant must have disaster recovery and business continuity plans as well as protocols for ensuring communication in the event of data breaches.

Wait, isn’t HIPAA only for human medicine?

Your pets are part of your family. The data collected from them is a direct link to humans as well. We believe that protecting pet data ensures the privacy of the owners and other members of the household.

Being HIPAA compliant is a great way to ensure a high level of security, privacy scrutiny, and above all, trust.

Veterinary medicine is undergoing a rapid evolution. In an era where AI is revolutionizing numerous industries, it’s imperative for companies operating in the health sector to uphold the highest standards of innovation and excellence.

This is exactly what we did at VetRec

With the founding team coming from Microsoft, privacy and security is engrained into the DNA of VetRec. We strive to make sure that veterinary professionals and their clients can trust VetRec with their data.

We want to ensure our customers the highest level of trust. Companies building in the veterinary medicine space should be subject to the highest standards. Being HIPAA compliant is the best opportunity to show what matters the most and to show how from engineering, all the way to design and experience, security and privacy are the top priority.

VetRec and HIPAA

To make sure we are held at the highest standards, we’ve used Vanta to get our certification, training, and necessary security measures.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some specifics:

• Data can only be accessed by authorized people with specific auditable reasons.
• Use highest of standards when it comes to security, both in the application as well as in employee practices like using a password manager and multifactor authentication across critical systems.
• Ensured that vendors across infrastructure, storage and hosting are compliant with best practices and data is properly encrypted.
• Have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan in place to ensure data recovery in the event of a disaster.
• Automated tests to ensure that all systems are protected and no vulnerabilities are present.

Overall, we have established controls to ensure that your data never falls on the wrong hands.

Conclusion

Veterinary medicine should be held with the same high standards that human medicine is. Being HIPAA compliant is a great way for a company to build the trust and have really high standards when it comes to data management.

VetRec’s security and privacy values show this. Being HIPAA compliant is just the first step. Stay tuned for our next security and audit compliant certification.

Until next time!

If you have any questions or comments please email privacy@vetrec.io

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