HIPAA and FileMaker Pro - Richard Carlton Consulting


	Richard Carlton Consulting Inc has been very involved with HIPAA related issues through its work with Sutter Health and the U.C. San Francisco Medical Center. Our experience is of great value to healthcare related organizations who wish to employ FileMaker. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 affects computer and database systems which interface with healthcare professionals. While HIPAA does not provide specific instructions for complying with HIPAA, it does provide guidelines that should be met. Fortunately, this means that FileMaker, or any other technology, is NOT prohibited by HIPAA. It does mean however that FileMaker databases containing patient information, or other sensitive materials, need to be "in compliance" by April 21, 2005. Getting into compliance with FileMaker Pro 6 is a tricky affair and successful compliance may or may not be possible depending upon your organizations interpretations of the HIPAA statutes (this is where the lawyer come in). However, FileMaker Pro 9, was specifically engineered for easily compliance with HIPAA as well as other government regulations regarding database setup and usage. Specifically, FileMaker's greatly improved security system allows FileMaker to comply with HIPAA, provided the database developer is skilled and is experienced with HIPAA issues. Point to point encryption and user specific security features are essentially non existent in FMP 6, and are of critical important to HIPAA. FMP 9 supports these features plus a dizzying array of other improvements that leads to HIPAA compliance. However, the average end user is not capable of developing a HIPAA compliant database with FMP 9, since doing so requires restricted interface access and very specific security procedures. Richard Carlton Consulting has been developing mission critical FileMaker solutions for companies for the past 14 years. For more information, regarding HIPAA and FileMaker, please feel free to contact us.