What Makes A Form Builder HIPAA Compliant?
By
Form Vessel
·
4 minute read
Key Takeaway
A “HIPAA compliant form builder” cannot guarantee compliance on its own, but the right platform can make compliance significantly easier by supporting HIPAA technical safeguards like access controls, audit logging, encryption, and secure transmission. Form Vessel was built for healthcare to keep compliance features upfront while still offering an intuitive, flexible form building experience that helps covered entities and business associates protect PHI and strengthen their overall compliance program.
Table of Contents
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Always consult a qualified attorney or compliance professional when interpreting HIPAA regulations.
HIPAA can be confusing. It’s filled with jargon and dense writing that sometimes seems to ramble without actually saying much. One of the biggest perceived shortcomings in the HIPAA documentation is that it does not provide much guidance on implementation specifics. However, this is intentional. HIPAA provides the standards and leaves it up to covered entities and business associates to figure out what solution works best for their setup.
Many providers rely on third-party, HIPAA compliant platforms to help clear up some of this ambiguity. One of the most popular software spaces that champions the HIPAA compliant title is form builders. This is for good reason. Form builders are a clear example of systems that collect PHI, which means they must be properly safeguarded. However, this also opens questions about how these systems maintain compliance. This blog will examine what it means to be a HIPAA compliant form builder and how Form Vessel can support your organization.
What Does It Mean To Be a HIPAA Compliant Form Builder?
A Google search for a HIPAA compliant form builder will return a ton of options that all claim to be HIPAA compliant. However, it’s important to understand what that means and how many of the popular options capitalize on the term.
Can a Form Builder Be Compliant?
This is an important question and it’s critical to understand that a form builder itself cannot be compliant. This is simply a search term that many companies try to capitalize on because it’s what most people are looking for. If any builder advertises their platform as a one-stop shop for full form compliance, run! A quality form builder can only support compliance.
It sounds similar, but it’s a very important difference. Compliance comes out of a variety of safeguards that include physical, technical, and administrative tasks. Compliance focused software is generally built around the technical safeguards but cannot help with the physical and administrative tasks. These are items that are specific to the covered entity.
For example, physical safeguards demand that even if a form is collected with a HIPAA-aligned platform, there should be privacy screens, secure workstations, and other measures to protect against accidental viewing. Meanwhile, administrative safeguards require that an organization keep proper documentation and conduct regular security reviews of all aspects of their setup.
Disclaimer: The above safeguards are an example of a small set of requirements. It is important to consult with a compliance professional to ensure your organization is achieving all the required benchmarks.
How Can Form Builders Support Compliance?
Even though compliant form builders can’t fully guarantee compliance, they can offer many features that can be beneficial to an organization. Quality options should demonstrate that they align with important safeguards. They all matter, but the technical safeguards are the most relevant to the software space. These include five standards:
- Access Controls
- Audit Controls
- Integrity Controls
- Authentication Controls
- Transmission Security
These standards are further segmented by required implementations and addressable implementations. This causes a lot of confusion because addressable implementations may seem optional. However, all this means is that if the implementation is skipped, there must be a reasonable explanation along with valid documentation and an acknowledgement of the risk this carries.
Quality form builders should not skip on addressable safeguards. They include items like automatic logoff and encryption protocols. These are very important for data security. Since form builders interact so heavily with PHI, it’s important to ensure that the chosen system is implementing as many safeguards as possible, not avoiding those that aren’t explicitly required.
How Does Form Vessel Support HIPAA Compliance?
A quality form builder should make achieving compliance easier, not more confusing. We built Form Vessel with two goals in mind:
- Keep HIPAA Compliance Features at the Forefront
- Create a Genuinely Enjoyable Form Building Experience
We honor the first point by being a healthcare first form building option. HIPAA compliance is a core feature, not a paid add on. We don’t hide compliance necessities behind an enterprise plan, and we don’t restrict designs either. Meanwhile, our team is dedicated to ensuring that our tool remains aligned with HHS guidance on HIPAA safeguards to provide top tier protections for your patients’ sensitive data.
The second point is equally important to us because we did not want to build a tool that is simply designed to support compliance. Healthcare providers already have to deal with so many systems that are clunky, hard to use, and require too much training. Just because something is made for healthcare doesn’t mean it has to skip on other features. Form Vessel is designed to be intuitive and powerful. Easy drag and drop functions ensure that form building is quick and painless, while extensive design controls protect users from creative restrictions.
Still, we believe trust and transparency are everything when it comes to HIPAA compliance, so you should fully understand what Form Vessel can and cannot do.
What Form Vessel Is
It is a HIPAA aligned form builder that can support your organizations compliance goals. We have designed it with data security at the top of mind. You should feel confident that your chosen software is implementing proper safeguards for the PHI it handles. Cyber security is constantly evolving, and no system can fully guarantee 100% safety, but the Form Vessel team is always working to ensure that our system is up to date with security best practices.
What Form Vessel Is Not
Form Vessel is not a guaranteed compliance tool. As stated previously, that does not exist. We want to support compliance, and leading our customers into a false sense of security does not support that mission.
Is Form Vessel Right For Your Organization?
If you are looking for a quality form building experience that can also support your organization’s HIPAA compliance, Form Vessel is for you. Our software is easy enough for small teams to implement quickly, but still powerful enough to be fully utilized by larger teams with more resources. Wherever your practice lies on the spectrum, Form Vessel can be a great step in the right direction for digital form security.