Verizon Enterprise Solutions has announced a cloud and data center infrastructure portfolio specifically designed to help the health care industry meet the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements for safeguarding electronic protected health information.
These services will include the secure storing of electronic protected health information (ePHI) in Verizon’s Terremark data centers.
Available immediately, the new services offer Verizon clients in the health care, insurance, pharmaceutical and supporting industries a full range of public and private cloud services that meet applicable physical, administrative and technical security controls under HIPAA.
The new health-care-enabled services are:
- Colocation
- Managed Hosting
- Enterprise Cloud
- Enterprise Cloud Express Edition and Enterprise Cloud Private Edition
Along with each service, Verizon also provides a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement, through which Verizon works closely with clients to safeguard their patients’ ePHI, though they obviously do require that client’s remains responsible for ensuring that they comply with HIPAA and all other applicable laws and regulations.
“Today’s health care provider is faced with the enormous and costly burden of protecting personal health information for patients,” said Dr. Peter Tippett, chief medical officer and vice president of Verizon’s health IT practice. “To address this need, we are bringing to market a suite of cloud services that enables health care providers to secure patient data while offloading the burden of building and managing their own data centers. By enabling a connected health care system, we intend to transform U.S. health care delivery.”
“Health industry CIOs have a pressing need for reliable, financially secure third parties or business associates that will help address the technical, physical and administrative safeguard requirements under HIPAA security rules,” said Lynne Dunbrack, program director, Connected Health IT at IDC. “Offering a secure computing capability backed by strong performance-level agreements will be compelling to these CIOs.”
