What is the HIPAA Enforcement Rule?
The HIPAA Enforcement Rule is a 2006 addition to the original Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). HIPAA required the Secretary of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop regulations protecting the privacy and security of certain health information.
The HIPAA Enforcement Rule introduced the ability for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to fine organizations for avoidable ePHI breaches. HHS’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for this enforcement, which it achieves through compliance reviews, outreach to encourage compliance, and investigating complaints.
Financial penalties and other HIPAA sanctions act as a deterrent against HIPAA violations while ensuring covered entities are held accountable for protecting patients' privacy, the confidentiality of health data, and providing patients with access to their health records on request. The penalty structure for HIPAA violations is tiered and based on the knowledge a covered entity had of the violation.
The financial and other penalties incurred due to HIPAA violations and data breaches can be extraordinarily costly—from significant fines that vary by violation, organizational costs of issuing notifications and mitigating the damages following breaches, to the possibility of criminal prosecution.
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Join our upcoming webinar, where leading cybersecurity experts Ciaran Martin and Victoria Baines will discuss findings from Vanta’s second annual State of Trust Report. Understand the risks facing UK organisations, why good security means good business and how to minimise manual security work through AI and automation.
Join Danny Sheridan, Co-founder and CEO at Fern (YC W23), and Brian Kuan, Product Marketing Manager at Vanta (YC W18), for a deep dive into why startups should prioritize compliance early in their journey, and how Vanta can help you become SOC 2-ready in as little as four weeks—giving time back for you to focus on building a company.
Join our upcoming webinar, where leading cybersecurity experts Ciaran Martin and Victoria Baines will discuss findings from Vanta’s second annual State of Trust Report. Understand the risks facing UK organisations, why good security means good business and how to minimise manual security work through AI and automation.
Join Danny Sheridan, Co-founder and CEO at Fern (YC W23), and Brian Kuan, Product Marketing Manager at Vanta (YC W18), for a deep dive into why startups should prioritize compliance early in their journey, and how Vanta can help you become SOC 2-ready in as little as four weeks—giving time back for you to focus on building a company.
Curious about why compliance is so important, which businesses need it, and how Vanta's automation can help you quickly achieve it? Join Vanta’s 45-minute live product demo where you’ll learn how Vanta goes beyond compliance to enhance your overall security and trust management.
Watch our Coffee and Compliance session, where our experts, Ethan Heller, GRC, Subject Matter Expert at Vanta, and Brad Dispensa,WWPS Specialist SA at Amazon Web Services (AWS) cover some of the challenges of SOC 2 compliance and show how Vanta and AWS work together to simplify and accelerate SOC 2 compliance.
We had the pleasure of hosting Jeremy Epling, Vanta’s CPO from our Vanta Sydney office, where he shares and demonstrates some exciting new product updates designed to help security teams future-proof and scale their GRC programs more easily.
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