Clients, partners, industry analysts and everyone else who knows Sourcing Force understands our unrelenting customer focus. It’s just part of our DNA. So staying compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act through our HIPAA Compliance Program isn’t about checking off another box, or adding another accolade. As outlined in our press release, delving into the incredibly rigorous process of compliance with HIPAA was all about doing what is in our customers’ best interests.
HIPAA requirements are designed to protect healthcare organizations’ patient data. As data breaches and similar incidents seem to become more frequent, the rules around information security are getting more stringent, and HIPAA is no exception. Proving compliance was a six-month intensive process for Sourcing Force involving all areas of the company. After having gone through it, I can see why it’s so rare for source-to-pay providers to stay current in their compliance with HIPAA standards.
Exceeding rigorous HIPAA requirements.
But merely “meeting” HIPAA standards was never part of our playbook. With so many major healthcare organizations as customers, we understood the need to exceed the rigorous levels of safeguards across administration and technology required to ensure patient privacy and security. Our commitment is particularly important for our many healthcare customers who must ensure complete confidentiality of patient records.
What is critical to note, is that achieving compliance with HIPAA privacy and security rules is something that just happens once and then we’re done. The whole procedure is ongoing, necessitating the continuous reassessment of our processes and technologies because the regulations change on near-constant basis.
Maintaining a robust approach through our HIPAA Compliance Program is critical for cloud platform service providers like Sourcing Force. Our Healthcare customers leverage the Sourcing Force Cloud Platform to streamline their contract management, procurement, sourcing and analytics workflows (and workloads), reducing the time and resources required to increase productivity through a single source of integrated, shared Master Data and metadata. Healthcare reliance on cloud technologies has become so pervasive because of the ease it provides in managing, storing and sharing documents and data. It makes providing health services much more collaborative and efficient – and cost efficient for organizations with lean IT infrastructures.
Because our healthcare customers’ back-end systems, such as ERP or finance, integrate with ours, we are responsible for providing – and proving – the highest levels of data security and privacy. As important as achieving compliance with HIPAA requirements is, we go way beyond them to provide a truly secure environment. For instance, our teams work around the clock to ensure compliance and provide consistently high security; Our encryption process and policies exceed what HIPAA mandates; We’re SOC 2 attested to have proper control procedures and practices related to security and availability; Offsite backups and business continuity / data recovery plans are more rigorous than what HIPAA specifies.
Cloud-based source-to-pay and contract management solutions like Sourcing Force’s are a major boon to industries like healthcare. But only if, like ours, they can ensure all the necessary security measures are in place. That’s why not every source-to-pay provider can say they exceed the compliance requirements of HIPAA, as validated by independent third-party examination.