Here’s to your health: We’re HIPAA compliant

Here at SurveyMonkey, we understand how important the healthcare provider-patient relationship is. That’s why we offer a variety of healthcare survey templates to provide patient insight to doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff.

If you want to conduct online surveys, but also need to comply with the HIPAA guidelines, we have big news to share.

If you work in medicine or in healthcare, then you’re probably familiar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It sets privacy and security requirements for how you care for patients’ protected health information (PHI). The Department of Health and Human Services has announced new HIPAA requirements that go into effect September 23, 2013.

We’re a step ahead of these new requirements. To conduct HIPAA-compliant surveys, just upgrade to a paid plan (if you haven’t already) and enter into our Business Associate Agreement.

It doesn’t stop there though. In addition to offering our standard set of powerful survey tools, we’ll help covered entities meet their HIPAA obligations with the administrative, physical and technical safeguards that are consistent with HIPAA requirements. What does this mean exactly? Well, we’ve put alert messages in place to remind users of their HIPAA obligations and warn them when they perform sensitive operations on PHI. Logs of account activity are also available and just like your online bank account, we offer 30-minute session timeouts for added security. Thanks to the help of security consultants and health information privacy experts, we’re ensuring that our security measures are up to speed with HIPAA’s specialized and exacting requirements.

Keeping things simple? That’s always a priority for us in everything we do. Our standard Business Associate Agreement contains all of the provisions required by HIPAA (including the HITECH Act and related rules made by the DHHS), in order to make it easy for you to bring us on board as a business associate and to HIPAA-enable your SurveyMonkey account. For a fee, you can also negotiate a custom BAA with us that fits your internal compliance rules.

We hope this news makes your life as a healthcare provider easier, gets you on the path to greater insights from your patients and of course, helps you make better decisions about patient care.

For even more information on what a HIPAA-enabled SurveyMonkey account can do for you and your organization, please be sure to visit our HIPAA FAQ or feel free to contact us with any compliance questions that you may have.