Overview
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (including the Privacy Rule, Security Rule, Breach notification Rule, and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) ("HIPAA"), requires Covered Entities and Business Associates to take certain measures to protect health information that can identify an individual.
Zoho Connect does not collect, use, store, or maintain health information protected by HIPAA for its own purposes. However, Zoho Connect provides certain features (as described below) to help its customers use Zoho Connect in a HIPAA compliant manner.
HIPAA requires Covered Entities to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with its Business Associates. You can request our BAA template by sending an email at legal@zohocorp.com.
Zoho Connect provides the following features that allow network administrators to implement a intranet for their organization in a HIPAA compliant manner.
Labelling of ePHI
Network admins can mark the user profile fields that might contain any electronically protected health information (ePHI) as 'personal information' and encrypt them for additional security. Encrypting personal information helps in preventing unauthorized access to confidential data.
While creating an app using Custom Apps in Zoho Connect, the app creator can mark any field that might contain ePHI as 'contains health info (ePHI)' to ensure the data is encrypted.
The data in the following entities — tasks, events, and polls and the titles of Posts, Forums, Groups, Manuals, Articles are not considered as ePHI.
Data encryption
All the data on your network is stored on Zoho Connect servers in an encrypted format. Zoho Connect uses one of the strongest and most secure ciphers such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), to encrypt sensitive data and AES-256 to secure data stored on our servers. This helps you to protect your data from unauthorized access, disclosure, or modification. In addition to this, the data stored is Encrypted At Rest (EAR) and all data transfers in the web happen in secure mode (HTTPS) for utmost security.
Audit logs to track data sources and modifications
Zoho Connect has extensive
Audit Logs to record the activities in your network. This helps admins to track and monitor deletions and modifications in the network and user data at any time. Furthermore, Edit History in Feeds has a detailed record of changes made to the posts, and comments.
Audit logs for modifications made in Custom Apps are currently not available.
Data deletion and retention
Users in the network can delete the posts, comments, attachments, manuals, groups, events, and town halls shared and created by them. However, a copy of deleted items will be available in the trash of each module. Only network admins can access the contents in the trash and restore them, if required.
Inactive networks in Zoho Connect are automatically deleted by our systems. However, the data in the deleted networks are retained for 30 days, after which it will be permanently deleted. Within that period, admins can write to support@zohoconnect.com and get their network restored.
The option to label ePHI as personal information, audit logs, edit history, and trash to store deleted data are available only in
paid plans of Zoho Connect. Click
here to view pricing.
Disclaimer: The information presented herein should not be taken as legal advice. This article is written to help organizations understand how Zoho Connect can enable them to be HIPAA compliant. We urge you to contact your legal advisor to know how HIPAA is applicable, its impact on your organization, and the processes involved to be HIPAA compliant.