How to Build a HIPAA Compliant EMR With Knack

Introduction to HIPAA-Compliant EMR Tools with Knack

There. My name is Dimitri and I’m here from Knack. In this video, we’re gonna show you how to create a HIPAA-compliant EMR scheduling and documentation tool. It’s so important to protect your patient data in the healthcare industry, and Knack is a great choice for small practices and clinics who need to improve based on the new HIPAA regulation updates.

By the end of this video, you’re gonna wanna reach out to our sales company to discuss our HIPAA options, by checking the link down below.

Understanding HIPAA Requirements

So first of all, let’s talk about the HIPAA regulation updates. HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was established to safeguard sensitive patient information. It’s crucial for healthcare organizations to maintain compliance with HIPAA to protect patient privacy and avoid legal fines and penalties.

Many small medical practices, clinician groups, have been preparing for upcoming changes to the HIPAA regulation, which could result in more resources to investigate alleged violations of HIPAA and an increase in fines for HIPAA violations. Things like conducting regular risk assessments to identify and mitigate potential threats to PHI, implementing robust data security measures—including encryption, access controls, and incident response plans—providing ongoing training to employees on HIPAA policies and procedures, establishing clear and accessible procedures for patients to exercise their privacy rights.

If you’re prepping for more stringent health care regulations or just want to broaden your safety posture around personal health information, the Knack database is a powerful tool for small and medium-sized health care organizations for managing and securing health data to maintain HIPAA compliance.

Introducing the EMR Healthcare Template

So for this video, we’re gonna dive into our EMR healthcare template. It’s an electronic medical record—or electronic health record is what that acronym stands for—and it’s a transformative solution for healthcare management crafted to cater to a diverse range of users, including clinicians, doctors, nurses, support staff, and administrators.

EMR seamlessly integrates vital medical information. Doctors and nurses harness the platform’s capabilities to streamline their workflows. They can effortlessly view appointments, create progress notes, prescribe medications, and comprehensively manage patient records. Practice owners and business managers wield comprehensive administrative control, easily overseeing the entirety of healthcare operations.

Creating an EMR App in Knack

An EMR system is the unifying force streamlining data entry and health records, optimizing patient care and operational efficiency across the healthcare ecosystem. So let’s take a look really quick at this EMR template. If we go to the top right and create a new app, we can start from a sample app. And one of those can be in the—you can see right here—healthcare industry.

And this is gonna be for the electronic medical records. So this Knack database addresses a lot of requirements, such as encryption, access controls, and audit trails. HIPAA-only hosting on a security-enhanced infrastructure in Amazon’s cloud that meets the strictest government security requirements, which is called GovCloud, which needs additional logging and auditing around all data access. And it has end-to-end encryption.

Securing Patient Data and Permissions

Let’s take a look at how Knack ensures data integrity and confidentiality, making it a really compliant HIPAA solution. So for data entry and collection, we can grab appointments, appointment notes, allergies, vaccinations, lab reports, family history, as well as different messages.

As you can see, there are a variety of different user roles like doctors, patients, practice owners, office managers, and front and back office managers, as well as nurses. They all have specific access, and that level of granularity is great for security, especially with what the HIPAA requirements need.

As you can see here, the Knack system has a very specific and intensive user login system that requires you to have high-level logins, and security is of the utmost importance here. You can restrict API responses, enable IP blocking, and much, much more. And as you can see here, if you aren’t compliant, it says that you aren’t. And in order to become compliant, you can follow along with our guide to make sure that we have the level of HIPAA compliance needed.

Inputting, Auditing, and Tracking Patient Data

Now healthcare professionals are able to input and collect patient data very securely inside of this template. You can customize a lot of these different fields. As you can see inside here, there are a myriad of different fields that you can choose from, like adding short text, different choice options, files, dates, person options, signatures, and much, much more. Administrators can configure user permissions to restrict access to sensitive information, data auditing, and compliance reporting.

It’s really important to have audit trails for HIPAA compliance. And HIPAA requires healthcare organizations to maintain comprehensive audit trails and regularly monitor compliance activity. Knack database provides robust auditing and reporting features. Knack database’s audit trail features make it easy to track down who accessed patient records and when.

These records are invaluable for ensuring compliance and investigating any potential breaches. I love the fact that, for all intents and purposes, we can limit fields to only be allowed for specific users and we can check who changed what when. And I know HIPAA loves it too. As you can see right here inside of this system, I can easily add to the records within here.

And anytime I go in and add record data inside of this, I’m going to have the system essentially track the fact that I inputted it. Or in instances where I’d edit it, it would track that as well. That’s exactly what I was referring to earlier with having that trail right there so that you can make sure that you know who edited what—and that’s compliant with HIPAA.

Appointment Scheduling, Workflows, and Collaboration

As you can see, this test patient was added to the system and all of their data was manually inputted. And we’d be able to track who actually added that, being me. Now let’s talk about how you can actually set appointments.

Many clinics that Knack works with struggle to use spreadsheets to maintain patient data. Maintaining data across remote clinics can lead to data overrides, bogged-down systems, and information overload.

Knack provides a solution by enabling real-time coordination of data access and updates. Knack helped them stop accidental changes so everyone could work on information simultaneously, keeping records consistent and accurate.

Knack also works with many clinics that need a solution to improve coordination workflow dynamics for records management, scheduling appointments, and claims. Many can now access these materials in real time, and those involved can add notes to records, access scheduling systems, and track appointments in one unified platform.

As you saw, I was able to easily create an appointment inside of this in a few moments. That wasn’t the case for a lot of these different companies prior. And it allows patients to view scheduled appointments, prescriptions, and uploaded documents. It facilitates a comprehensive overview of healthcare interactions.

Messaging, Notes, and Sharing

This system provides doctors with a daily schedule list or calendar view of appointments, and it streamlines appointment scheduling and enhances doctor-patient communication. You also can communicate and document share between patients and doctors so that they can message each other.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, but it’s pretty difficult to get into their portal. But with Knack, it’s super easy to facilitate secure communication and document sharing like lab reports, allergy notes, vaccinations, and much, much more.

Adding notes like I just did right there and people being able to access that—as a doctor or as a patient—is super easy.

HIPAA Next Steps

So here’s the thing. No template’s gonna be perfect, but we’re gonna help you make sure that you’re perfectly compliant with HIPAA with our EMR template.

If you like this video and wanna take the next step, please visit our HIPAA solution page at knack.com/pricing/hipaa-compliance-package and fill out our form to connect with one of our solution specialists to discuss your specific requirements.

Check out that link down below. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next one.