“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky,” said Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. It’s a nice, optimistic sentiment, but if you’re a healthcare provider using the cloud, you’re likely thinking that, in your position, clouds are still plenty capable of ushering storms where your HIPAA compliance is concerned. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides clear rules about the storage and sharing of protected health information (PHI). All organizations that handle PHI are required to comply with HIPAA standards, but that can become a little trickier if you engage a cloud service provider (CSP). As long-time, highly experienced HIPAA assessors, we provide valuable insight and services that help organizations avoid any HIPAA missteps. In this article, we’re going to outline eight things you can do to ensure you stay compliant when engaging a cloud service provider (CSP) so that your cloud doesn’t “usher in any storms.”

In the famed series Lord of the Rings, the unlikely hero Frodo Baggins offers to carry the terrible burden of the One Ring to Mordor in order to destroy it and save all of Middle Earth from evil. Immediately after he makes this decision, he says, “Though I do not know the way.”

Someone once said that "a marathon is hundreds of miles. The finish is the last 26.2." Maybe that “someone” worked at the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) because they are coming to the “finish” at the end of their latest marathon, though it’ll still take some work and time to get over the line.

All of us likely remember hearing something like this from our parents: “when I come in there, your room better be clean!”

Have you ever picked out a hike in the mountains, but once you arrive at the base and look up, you think to yourself, “oh man, I have to climb that?” Your enthusiasm might bleed away a little bit.

Famed poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.”

If you’ve ever tried to learn another language, you know that it’s incredibly difficult to just jump in—self-instruction can be difficult, disorganized, and overwhelming. It’s helpful, when setting off on this ambitious endeavor, to engage with a helpful tool that features a more structured approach with instruction on specific concepts. Let’s face it—if there’s something out there that can simplify complex ideas, it just makes sense to take advantage of it.

Consider sugar and salt—both are “spices” of a kind, and since they’re both often in the form of fine white grain, they look similar as well. So similar in fact, you might mistakenly switch one in for the other, setting yourself up for quite the surprise at first bite.