Leading Unified Communications Informs Private Practice Owners on How to Thwart 6-Figure Penalty Fees for HIPAA Violations
Baton Rouge, LA – November 16, 2016 – Gage, a leading provider of unified communications, announced today that the company is educating private healthcare practices on how they can eliminate the risk of incurring large HIPAA penalties simply by updating some of their outdated technology. HIPAA compliance has long been thought of as an unenforceable regulation, with a distant threat of consequences, but in the past year, the government has added pressure to private practices like never before. As a result, Gage is informing all of their current customers about these risks and how they can be eliminated altogether. Gage is also advising those customers on how to get their technology in order, and in compliance with HIPAA regulations before they are penalized with drastic fees, which can sometimes reach up to six-figure penalties.
“The biggest oversight in the industry is that nobody thinks the HIPAA police are coming,” stated Jason Landry, VP of Sales of Gage. HHS, the governing body of HIPAA, is now using the tactic of mailing self-audits to private practices in order to get them to self-enforce these regulations. “In most cases, a private practice will receive a letter with a pre-paid return envelope, accompanied by a questionnaire that has several dozen questions concerning HIPAA compliance that the practice must answer and mail back within 10 business days.”
Gage is helping private practices by offering a limited number of enterprise-level risk assessments for practices that have concerns about HIPAA compliance. Their aim is to give private practices the information they need so they can make decisions from an informed perspective, instead of simply hoping that they are in accordance with the law.
Gage understands that most practices are focused on serving their patients’ needs first, and don’t have the extra time to perform a full risk assessment. In order to help time-pressed, private practice owners, the company is sharing a few questions that they will likely face in the HSS self-audit letters. For example, here’s one question which private healthcare practices regularly face in the questionnaire, “Does your organization use enterprise-level antivirus and malware protection on your network?”. Another question is “Does your organization have a proper firewall on your Internet connection?”. Or lastly, “Do you send PHI (Patient Healthcare Information) using encrypted email services?”. Gage conducts an audit and assists private practices in answering these questions.
Gage considers itself to be a suitable advisor for private healthcare practices in all aspects of IT, because they are focused more centrally on introducing technology that has a positive bottom line impact on any organization they work with. In fact, one of their key strategies to market expansion over the years has been to build relationships through perpetual education of their customers. The organization considers itself a leader in the marketplace and it is focused on maintaining that dominance by being an endless supplier of high-value, IT based knowledge.
“We possess so much technical expertise on our team,” added Landry. “Our staff is comprised of employees who are bursting at the seams with technical certifications. While private practices usually come to us to get HIPAA compliant in a hurry, they usually get very curious about how else we can make their organizations more efficient, effective and much more profitable.”