Protecting Patient Information

Our focus is aligned with yours: dedication to patient care. A secure and efficient IT infrastructure serves to mitigate major liabilities in the health care field, specifically the exposure of patient protected health information (PHI) and the management of risk associated with its storage and transmission.

Enterprise IT Provider

We are experts at advising on Enterprise IT system needs. Our skillset covers the needs of individual offices all the way up to multi-facility Health Care Systems. As medical services have become more IT dependent, ensuring that the system backbone of your organization is healthy and robust is critical

Support, On Your Schedule

With technicians available 24/7, we are experienced with supporting organizations round the clock in the healthcare industry. By ensuring healthcare organizations are practicing proper IT hygiene, we can aid in identifying the potential HIPAA compliance issues that stem from mission critical information systems, and can incur significant fines.

HIPAA Violation Penalty Structure

Ensuring your systems are HIPAA compliant is mission critical to your healthcare organization. Many organizations have incurred significant financial penalties for falling short of HIPAA requirements. Each category of HIPAA violation carries a separate penalty.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) determines a financial penalty. OCR considers a number of factors when determining penalties, such as the length of time a violation was allowed to persist, the number of people affected and the nature of the data exposed. The general factors that can affect the level of financial penalty also include prior history, the organization’s financial condition and the level of harm caused by the violation.

HIPAA Financial Penalty Tiers

• Tier 1:  $100 to $50,000
• Tier 2:  $1,000 to $50,000
• Tier 3:  $10,000 to $50,000
• Tier 4:  $50,000 per violation

The four penalty categories are as follows:

• Tier 1: A violation that the covered entity was unaware of and could not have realistically avoided, had a reasonable amount of care had been taken to abide by HIPAA Rules
• Tier 2: A violation that the covered entity should have been aware of but could not have avoided even with a reasonable amount of care. (but falling short of willful neglect of HIPAA Rules)
• Tier 3: A violation suffered as a direct result of “willful neglect” of HIPAA Rules, in cases where an attempt has been made to correct the violation
• Tier 4: A violation of HIPAA Rules constituting willful neglect, where no attempt has been made to correct the violation

Unite IT works to properly construct the systems and the defensive measures that protect patient information and how it can be accessed.

Managing Your Risk and Liability

In the past, what have you done when your systems crashed? How frustrating is it when your patients hear “Our systems are down at the moment”? That is the kind of message that can cause patients to look elsewhere for a healthcare provider. By using the Unite IT team of experts, you know that we have your back, that there is someone who can get you up and running as quickly as possible.
Working with Unite IT can put your mind at ease that potential system crash points have been identified and remedies put in place before problems arise.

Large scale data loss, ransomware encryption, or other long-term outages are a persistent risk and can result in not only losses relating to critical care, but “door closing” financial losses to the organization overall.

We help you develop an emergency response plan including comprehensive, regularly tested, backup solutions designed with the needs of your patients at the forefront. We design these response plans for fast recovery, minimal data loss, and peace of mind overall, with plans that can encompass large scale facility destruction, and turn a permanent set-back, into a minor one.

IT Risk Assessment

When we meet with healthcare organizations, we determine what the most critical systems are and prioritize support to meet their specific compliance needs. This includes more than just basic “cyber security hygiene” requirements implemented as a means of “checking a box”.

We take a holistic assessment approach, encompassing all aspects of your organizations IT infrastructure starting with, system implementations and change management processes, software stack reviews, and monitoring its weakest points: its employees!
Our “Secret Shopper” approach to assessing your weaknesses can help you identify which of your employees may be placing you at significant risk with their IT related habits, giving you an opportunity for remediation before disaster strikes.