OnRamp Founder to Present at San Antonio HIMSS Luncheon
Austin, TX (PRWEB) January 15, 2014 -- OnRamp, a leading high security hosting provider with data center facilities in Texas and North Carolina, announced today that company Founder, Chad Kissinger will be the featured speaker at the San Antonio HIMSS Lunch and Learn on Thursday, January 16, 2014. Kissinger’s session, titled "Outsourcing IT in a HITECH Landscape," will highlight the need for developing partnerships with IT providers that understand the laws outlined by HIPAA and HITECH and are doing everything from the standpoint of their business to maintain compliance.
The final rules issued for HIPAA and HITECH mandate that any company working with electronic protected health information (ePHI) must ensure that all of the required physical, network and process security measures are in place to meet the compliance requirements set forth by law. With the threat of legal and financial repercussions for noncompliance as a result of the inadequate creation, storage, transmission or destruction of protected health information, ensuring the privacy and security of healthcare data is paramount.
"A weak point in the system, however, comes in the dealings with 3rd party IT vendors who maintain persistent access to ePHI and are thus deemed business associates by law," stated Kissinger. "For HIPAA covered entities who are now responsible for the actions of their business associate sub-contractors, with or without a signed Business Associate Agreement (BAA), evaluating their partnerships for managing critical patient data is a must."
Kissinger’s talk will serve to demonstrate the key concerns for working with IT providers, the critical elements of establishing a BAA and the main points of conflict when negotiating the responsibilities of covered entities and their sub-contractors in collectively maintaining the confidentiality, availability and integrity of EPHI.
OnRamp’s visit to the San Antonio Chapter of HIMSS is the first event in a long list of engagements with the Health Information Management Systems Society scheduled for 2014. OnRamp will also be attending the HIMSS14 Conference & Exhibition (Booth #5466) and the 2014 Texas HIMSS Regional Conference (Booth #34), where the company will showcase its full suite of high security data center and hosting services which include colocation, managed hosting, private clouds, HIPAA and PCI compliant hosting. For more information on the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and all its chapters, visit: http://www.himss.org.
About OnRamp
OnRamp was founded in 1994 in Austin, TX. As one of Texas’ first Internet Operations companies, OnRamp’s history is rooted in providing reliable and secure connectivity that enables distributed computing. Today, OnRamp is a Data Center operations company that delivers a full suite of cloud computing, managed hosting, high security hosting, colocation, and disaster recovery services backed by Full7Layer Support, to help customers build, deploy and manage Data Center operations at each and every layer.
As an SSAE 16 SOC I Type II certified, PCI Level 1 and HIPAA audited company, OnRamp’s state-of-the-art facilities feature the highest levels of security, redundancy, reliability and technical expertise with round-the-clock security and maintenance from a team of on-site network engineers. OnRamp specializes in assisting customers that interact with sensitive data by ensuring adherence to rigorous compliance standards including HIPAA.
Debra Danziger, OnRamp, http://www.onr.com, +1 (888) 667-2660, [email protected]
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