![]() ![]() ![]() As a result, the HITECH Act established a regulatory framework for EHRs that imposed security and privacy requirements not only on medical providers, but also on other companies and organizations they did business with that might also handle EHR data. ![]() However, while EHRs held a lot of promise to improve the health care industry, they also made it much faster and easier to transmit personally identifying data between organizations, which had serious implications for privacy and security. This aim of the law can be considered successful, with the number of acute care hospitals deploying EHRs expanding from 28% in 2011 to 84% in 2015. The law provided HITECH Act incentives for this purpose, in the form of extra payments to Medicare and Medicaid providers who transitioned to electronic records. The HITECH Act aimed to use some of that government spending to help the health care industry make the expensive leap into using EHRs. The HITECH Act was part of the larger American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was the stimulus package enacted in the early days of the Obama Administration to inject money into the economy in order to blunt the effects of the Great Recession. Why was the HITECH Act created and why is it important? As a result, much of the regulatory ecosystem that falls under the broad (and expensive) umbrella of HIPAA compliance today is actually a result of the passage of the HITECH Act. ![]() The law tackles its security and privacy goals by extending the rules laid down by the pre-existing HIPAA law to more and different kinds of businesses, and by adding tougher reporting and enforcement provisions. Those latter aspects will be the main focus of this article. (HITECH stands for Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health.) There are a number of provisions of the law that provide direct and indirect incentives to health care providers and consumers to move to EHRs, but the parts of the law of most interest to infosec professionals are those that tighten rules on providers to ensure that EHRs remain private and secure. The HITECH Act is a law that aims to expand the use of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States. ![]()
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