HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The US Department of Health and Human Services created and adopted a set of guidelines and procedures in 1996 for handling sensitive healthcare data. HIPAA-compliant systems are required for companies that work with PHIs (protected health information) and ePHIs (electronically protected health information).
HIPAA testing is required for entities engaging with payments, treatment, and operations in healthcare, as well as business associates that have access to patient information, payments, treatments, or operations.
Need for HIPAA Testing
The healthcare business can benefit greatly from the HIPAA compliance test. It assists in the transition from physical to digital records of healthcare data and oversees healthcare operations. It also increases the organization’s overall efficiency by ensuring a secure exchange of PHI.
Therefore, every organization in the healthcare sector should perform HIPAA testing regularly to guarantee that all internal processes and procedures are in the best interests of patients.
Best Strategies for HIPAA Testing
Let us now have a look at some of the best strategies that you can follow while performing HIPAA testing:-
Restricted Access
To comply with HIPAA regulations, a user should only be provided access to the information that is necessary to execute a task. The following methods can be used to implement strict access control:-
- An access control list that grants users access to just certain programs, modules, or locations.
- Every user identification within the system is identified and tracked by a unique identifier and/or number.
- Entry is controlled by the user and needs two-factor authentication.
- Role-based access where access privileges are determined by a user’s role. Example – A user with several job functions will have numerous roles and consequently multiple information access privileges.
Transmission of Data
In addition to primary encryption verification on databases and audit trails during sanity testing, using a network analyzer tool to check that all ePHIs are encrypted is critical when:
- The program allows data to be shared among all mobile devices and all desktops.
- Any external place can receive information.
- Data is transferred to an offline storage location.
Audit Trails
Audit trails are analyzed to conduct more extensive testing. To ensure that the entries generated are equivalent to the expected entries, a comparison study is conducted. Check the following items:-
- Check that all the audit trail entries relevant to all ePHI operations exist. When developing extensive test cases, use the role matrix to verify that no action gets overlooked. It’s also crucial to test and confirm that all entries for operations conducted on various devices are produced.
- Check that all entries have the needed information, such as the date and time of the action, the user’s access level, the specifics of the actions conducted, the user’s information, and other relevant information.
- Check to see if audit trail entries may be erased.
- Check that only specific and authorized users have access to audit trail entries.
- Check to see if audit trails have been encrypted.
Data Leakage Prevention
When conducting application testing for any healthcare institution, there is always the risk of data leakage. Make it a common habit to develop test data that behaves the same way actual data does. Replace the current field data (including name, address, SSN, phone number, etc.) with generic data. Using automation test data generation technologies built to provide high performance for huge data sets is the most secure method of doing it.
Load Balancing
This is likely the most important reason to follow HIPAA regulations, as losing patient information can put a person’s life at risk. The system’s capacity to maintain day-to-day operations while backups are done is tested using failover strategies and load balancing. It also assesses whether a system is capable of allocating more resources when necessary and recognizing that requirement when it occurs. When properly built and fully tested, a good failover plan must provide near-complete data security, little data loss, and quick recovery in the case of an incident.
Organization of Data
Standardize all test data needed to verify and validate application components. Example – If you’re testing the patient’s report generation, the data you’ll need is:
<PatientFirstName><PatientLastName><TestName><Date><Time>
Data structure aids in the definition of testing at several levels and across various factors.
Conclusion
HIPAA testing can help to enhance the overall efficiency of healthcare organizations. The testing strategies mentioned above can help you to effectively conduct HIPAA testing for your healthcare software. But to achieve the best results, you must take the help of a professional software testing company like QASource.
Visit QASource now to implement the best-in-the-industry HIPAA testing services for your software business.
