HIPAA-compliant application on cloud

[Mohamed El-Refaey]

Hi,

Do you have any idea if there is HIPAA-compliant application went ot the a public cloud or not? and if yes, what the procedures they followed or what are the conditions that helped them out being on a public cloud ?

[Vyas Sanzgiri]

I am not very familiar with HIPAA but are there any special considerations?

[fred rosenberger]

HIPPA is the Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act. It's original intent was to make sharing health care information easier between hospitals, insurance companies and so forth. There was a section on privacy which ultimately overshadowed the rest.

The basic principle is that you have to take certain precautions to protect the privacy of a patient's protected information.

The problem I see with 'the cloud' is that you can't really control what the other computers will do with the data. I'm not saying there ISN'T such an application, but I think there would be some rather significant obstacles.

[Mohamed El-Refaey]

You are right Fred. however there are large movement and efforts to make applications compliant with HIPAA and similar acts to be able to utilize the cloud. and lots of efforts are being done in the compliance, privacy and security in general and in the cloud context in specific.