HIPAA COMPLIANCE AND EMAIL TRANSMISSION.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides mandatory privacy assurance regulations that are valid nationwide and enforceable by federal authorities. These regulations do not apply to all organizations that handle medical records but they do apply to most health organizations, which under some conditions must be HIPAA compliant. HIPAA compliance using secure and usable email implies that it protects Protected Health Information (PHI) and other sensitive information.
The secure email service called Zmail <
http://ZmailService.com> provides full compliance for the health sector's HIPAA needs on the technical level, guarding data integrity, confidentiality and availability. The user interface and the data viewed or generated for transmission using Zmail constitute fully compliant standard transactions under HIPAA. Compliance is provided on a technical level, guarding data integrity, confidentiality and availability. Zmail offers customers online access to registration and secure email services, as well as services enabled by the secure email service (e.g., voting, secure web access, bidding, and payments), and provides for the transmission of messages electronically. Each of these Services is web-based and utilizes an interface accessed through a web-browser, email software or other compatible means. More interestingly, HIPAA compliance using Zmail never exposes Protected Health Information (PHI) and other sensitive
information. This means that the Zmail service is not made aware of PHI and is, thus, not required to sign a Business Associate Agreement for its customers.
There are other important regulatory compliance systems e.g.,
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)
International Standards Organization (ISO) 17799, Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA), and California SB-1386, that may also play a role in the health sector, particularly in terms of large health sector organizations.
Zmail is also in regulatory compatible with these regulations providing a well-rounded solution for the health sector's compliance with privacy regulations that may apply in each case, now and in the foreseeable future.
