HIPAA Compliant Chat APIs allow you to provide your users with a chat solution that is secure and private. These APIs will store data in encrypted form, making it far more difficult for an attacker to obtain sensitive information about your application’s users, such as their location or credit card numbers. This blog post highlights the most important considerations when selecting a HIPAA compliant chat API. It also provides a short list of popular solutions you may want to consider implementing into your applications.
What is HIPPA?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) is the most well-known part of HIPAA. It demands that healthcare providers, health plans, and employers establish policies to protect the privacy of each patient’s personal information. Should an organization fail to do this, it must face serious consequences. Under the law, if a violation occurs, fines may be imposed on individuals or institutions for up to $50,000 per patient for each violation incident. HIPPA requires all healthcare providers to provide important information about their services and billing procedures to their patients.
What is HIPAA Compliance?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was signed into law in 1996 to standardize health care data. It mandates that all health providers, health plans, public health facilities, and medical researchers develop policies to prevent the unauthorized use or access of protected health information (PHI). According to the law, any entity covered by HIPAA must adhere to minimum necessary data storage and sharing requirements. Your application must be protected from potential attackers if it stores sensitive personal information, such as a user’s credit card details or GPS location.
What Regulations are Covered by HIPAA?
The laws that protect patient information under HIPAA are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), the HITECH Act, and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). These three laws encompass many regulations, but all heavily influence how you should store and share sensitive data.
What Can Be Done to Ensure HIPAA Compliance?
To gain HIPAA compliance, you will need to adhere to the following standards. First, there must be a written HIPAA compliant policy in place that both addresses and allows for the security of protected health information. This means that the policy should include provisions on data minimization, risk assessments and assessments of workforce members’ training, and any other provisions that address security risks. Additionally, the policy should include privacy training for all users and a process for handling violations.
The second part of compliance is ensuring that your applications are developed with this policy in mind. This can be done by implementing best practices with a three-layered security approach. HIPAA compliance must be observed at all application levels – from the client to transfer protocols to storage and databases. The easiest way to ensure compliance is, to begin with good design practices; in this case, having a secure and private chat solution from the beginning.
Choose HIPAA Compliant Chat API and SDK:
- Audit Controls: You must authenticate users before they can access your application. If you use a 3rd party provider, this is an excellent place to start when looking at compliance.
- Encrypted Storage: To comply with Webrtc app company, the data collected by your application must be stored securely. You can use 3rd party tools to encrypt the storage of messages and any sensitive information submitted by users.
- Auditing Controls: If an individual or entity can view all the messages submitted by users, that would not be HIPAA compliant since it would violate patient privacy protection rules.
- Security on API layer: Many platforms allow you to send and receive messages between users without managing individual systems. However, you still need to be careful when it comes to security.
- Compliance with state and federal regulations: You will need to look at your individual state requirements as well as the HIPAA laws and ensure that you are compliant with both of these regulations.
Best Video Calling API Providers:
- MirrorLFy.com:
It allows you easily bundle a chat feature into your Best video chat api. MirrorLFy provides an API for iOS compliant with HIPAA and other privacy regulations.
- SendBird:
Send Bird is a cross-platform SDK and API that offers real-time chat services. It is built to help developers build better conversations by integrating user identity, group chats, live support, analytics, etc., into a straightforward interface. SendingBird allows you complete control over your data and currently supports HIPAA compliance (as well as other security features).
- Agora:
Agora is a conversational AI platform that makes it easy. The company has built a platform based on conversational interfaces, including a messaging API to send and receive messages and an Real time video chat api to create bots for different channels. The platform allows users to manage conversations and analyze their content in seconds. It also has a policy management layer that ensures compliance with all relevant regulations, such as HIPAA.
Final Verdict:
The Best HIPAA Compliant Chat API already has these features built-in. It must also comply with each state’s regulations since these can sometimes be more stringent than federal laws. When looking for the correct API, check if it has HIPAA Compliance in its features list to ensure you get an application with this kind of protection built in.
