HIPAA Compliance Analysis

The healthcare industry has wide range stakeholders like hospitals, labs and insurers, each having their own distinct operating landscape. Being healthcare providers, all of them are required to comply with HIPAA policies and standards. Following a hybrid approach for implementing HIPAA would help these different healthcare entities manage their compliance related activities better. The risk based model which is easily scalable would enable entities to perform risk assessment based on their operating landscape, while the checklist would allow all these entities to easily evaluate their compliance with HIPAA. For example, hospitals have to perform far more robust risk assessment when compared to that of health insurers or labs as they operate
The PCI standards aim to increase the accountability of vendors, and also protect payment card holder data (PCI, n.d.). Any merchant accepting card payment is required to be compliant with PCI standards to safeguard customer data, and prevent unauthorized access to these sensitive data. PCI Security Standards Council responsible for maintaining PCI standards has the power to block any merchants who fail to comply with the regulations. Also, since the council has all the major payment card players, they have a clear idea of the problems faced in the industry thereby helping them be proactive in resolving the
The council has set rules which are very streamlined and could be easily implemented by any business entity. The PCI-DSS documents clearly details the kind of payment card information that could be stored, and also clearly states the ports that needs to be verified to be compliant which makes it easy for any implementer to ensure compliance (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard , 2015). Hence, a small store requiring to be compliant with PCI DSS standards can look at hiring independent contractors to ensure compliance levels are met, and need not make a significant investment with regards to time and money to ensure compliance. Also, we have to accept that the PCI DSS standards are created with minimal requirements and aren’t too stringent. The framework is a bare minimum requirement required to operate in the payment processing