Over the years, it’s been really interesting to watch the changes in how a healthcare organization would approach various IT solutions. In the beginning almost everything in a healthcare organization was hosted onsite at the healthcare provider. As cloud progressed, many healthcare organizations were really hesistant to make the move. Then, we saw healthcare organizations go all in on the cloud. Now, we’ve found more of a homeostasis where health IT leaders are looking at the application and finding the right hosting for that application. This generally leaves a few applications hosted on site with a large number of them hosted in the cloud.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the need for every healthcare organization to be HIPAA compliant regardless of where their applications are hosted. However, during the transitions mentioned above, it was always astounding to me how many healthcare organizations didn’t really ensure that their third party hosting provider was HIPAA compliant. One challenge is that there’s no HIPAA compliant certificate or certification that an organization can get to verify that their HIPAA compliant. Instead, you have to do the work to make sure that whatever hosting service you use has done what’s needed to be HIPAA compliant.
To explore more of the ways that HIPAA compliant hosting and infrastructure has evolved and where it’s at today, I sat down with Philip Palmer, Director of Sales at Liquid Web and Kelly Goolsby, Director of Solution Architecture at Liquid Web. What was most fascinating about my discussion with Palmer and Goolsby is that the discussion was very little about the technical aspects and very much about the business aspects of HIPAA compliant hosting. It illustrates how HIPAA compliant hosting today isn’t a technical challenge, but it is an administrative challenge that has a real impact on your healthcare organization’s business.
In the interview, I ask the experts from Liquid Web to share some of the details of what’s requred to create a true HIPAA compliant hosting solution that protects healthcare organizations and their patients’ information. They also share with me some of the challenges associated with scaling your hosting infrastructure and maintaining security at scale when healthcare organizations expand. We know how common this challenge is as we’ve seen healthcare organizations consolidate over time.
I also ask them about how healthcare organizations should look at things like reliability and uptime when evaluating various hosting providers. HIPAA doesn’t have a requirement for this, but we all know how dependent every healthcare organization has become on technology. Knowing that your hosting provider is reliable is key to so many aspects of a healthcare business today.
Finally, we also asked Palmer and Goolsby to share some stories of success from healthcare organizations that have moved to a fully managed HIPAA hosting solution. Check out our interview with these Liquid Web experts to learn more about HIPAA compliant hosting designed for healthcare. Also, be sure to download this free Pre-Migration Cloud Compliance Checklist, to navigate the strategies that work for moving your healthcare hosting to the cloud.
Learn more about Liquid Web: https://www.liquidweb.com/
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