HIPAA Certified vs. HIPAA Compliant

This is a blog post on the phrase ‘HIPAA certified’ to inform you that there is no such thing as ‘HIPAA certified.’ What’s the correct term, then? ‘HIPAA compliant.’ This means that you, as a covered entity, or business associate, has been found in compliance with the HIPAA Security and Privacy Rules as established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). You have done your due diligence by putting in policies, processes and procedures to achieve technical, administrative and physical safeguards to protect PHI.

This is a blog post on the phrase ‘HIPAA certified’ to inform you that there is no such thing as ‘HIPAA certified.’ What’s the correct term, then? ‘HIPAA compliant.’ This means that you, as a covered entity, or business associate, has been found in compliance with the HIPAA Security and Privacy Rules as established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). You have done your due diligence by putting in policies, processes and procedures to achieve technical, administrative and physical safeguards to protect PHI.

The HHS does recognize any ‘HIPAA certification’ program as legitimate. When they come to inspect and audit, they will likely not care if you have a ‘HIPAA certified’ seal on your website. They care about the security and design of your controls to protect PHI to the best of your ability, and the actual policies and procedures your organization abides by.

While many use ‘certified’ and ‘compliant’ interchangeably to mean the same thing, they cannot be used to describe data centers, hosting providers or any service provider acting as a business associate to a covered entity that needs to achieve their own compliance. For example, it’s not ‘HIPAA certified data centers,’ it’s ‘HIPAA compliant data centers.’ Or ‘HIPAA compliant hosting,’ not ‘HIPAA certified hosting.’

This article, from ZDNet is properly titled Will Your Cloud Be HIPAA Compliant? Yet, despite its title, ‘certified’ appears everywhere in the article as it refers to data center providers:

But at least one person commenting on the article seems to understand the difference:

So for service providers in the healthcare industry – and for healthcare organizations that contract out to them, please take heed: the correct term is “HIPAA compliant” not “HIPAA certified.” Be wary of those that claim to be certified – because chances are, they might not really know what they’re talking about at all.