C I Host Becomes HIPAA-Certified to Handle Health Care IT Services

HostReview.com
Tuesday, November 26, 2002; 12:00 AM

BEDFORD, Texas, Nov 26, 2002 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- C I Host, a leading Web hosting and Internet infrastructure provider, has received HIPAA certification, making it one of the few Web hosting companies eligible to provide information technology services to health care organizations who must meet strict new federal patient confidentiality standards.

HIPAA-compliant IT services are essential for the more than 2 million firms and nonprofit entities in the U.S. that deal with health care and must comply with the new federal regulations on how they handle electronic information about patients. Those include hospitals, HMOs, insurance firms, payment clearinghouses and dental offices.

About 400,000 such health care providers filed for extensions last month because they couldn't meet an October 16 HIPAA compliance deadline, a spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which is overseeing the regulations, told Informationweek.com.

"We can save health care organizations months of paperwork and hundreds of thousands of dollars because we have already expended those resources to become HIPAA-compliant," said Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host. "By outsourcing to us, they can take advantage of a significant cost savings and attain peace of mind knowing their organization is backed up by a HIPAA compliant hosting partner."

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed in 1996, which outlines how patient information must be collected, used, maintained and transferred. A specific goal of HIPAA is to safeguard the electronic transfer of information when an employee's medical records are moved to a new insurance company due to a change in jobs.

Health care organizations can become HIPAA compliant themselves or can outsource their electronic handling of patient information to a firm that is HIPAA compliant, such as C I Host.

C I Host's data centers passed a strenuous audit by a Certified Information System Security Professional to ensure that the company meets HIPAA security and certification standards. It can take more than a year to become HIPAA-certified, and C I Host is the first Web hosting company to be certified to deal with clients on shared servers.

Few hosting companies have HIPAA certification. Bill Lazarus, assistant VP of technology and communication systems of St. Joseph Health Systems, which operates 15 hospitals in California and Texas, told Informationweek.com in mid-October that so many institutions applied for the extension because "none of the players are compliant yet."

"One of the reasons that we sought HIPAA compliance was to be able to help health care organizations meet these federal regulations," Faulkner said. "Providing IT services for businesses so they can focus on their core competency is something we have done for years and will continue to do for the health care industry."

HIPAA is hitting health care organizations where they have traditionally been weak -- in their investments in informational technology.

Health care in the U.S. is a $1 trillion industry, but it has historically spent only 1 to 3 percent of its revenues on informational technology, compared to banking and financial services, which spend as much as 15 percent.

That is changing, however. This year health care companies are expected to increase their IT spending by 8 percent to $35 billion, according to Gartner, an IT research firm.

Forces driving that change include the move to managed care and both HIPAA and a related federal law, HIPPA, which also deals with the privacy and security of electronic transfers of billing and other patient information. HIPPA stands for Healthcare Information Patient Privacy Act.

The most cost efficient use of new health care IT spending, industry analysts say, would be to outsource IT functions. An average business can save more than $100,000 a year by outsourcing its IT functions rather then developing them in-house, according to Forrester Research.

Becoming HIPAA-compliant is a natural progression for C I Host, which has a reputation for its emphasis on security and a firm financial foundation that allows it to invest in the kind of technology required by such far-reaching federal regulations.

All of C I Host's data centers have state-of-the-art security systems. Its robust network is built with redundant, diverse segments to maximize up time and thwart most denial of service attacks.

Despite a troubled economy that has caused several Web hosting companies to cut back on their services or shut down, C I Host has a firm financial foundation that has allowed it to grow and prosper. The company has data centers in Texas, Los Angeles and Chicago and is opening centers in London, Germany, Japan and India over the few next years.

About C I Host

C I Host (http://www.cihost.com), is a Web hosting and Internet solutions provider, domain name registrar (DNR) and application service provider (ASP) serving 175,000 individual consumers and businesses in 179 countries worldwide.

C I Host creates business-class hosting solutions for the small- and medium-enterprise (SME) market, with the broadest portfolio of managed hosting and value-added services in the industry. C I Host is accredited by ICANN to register domain names.

C I Host has been consistently ranked among the Top 5 Web hosting companies out of 16,000 around the globe by c|net's Ultimate Web Host List, HostPulse, WebHostsOnline.com and HostChart.com. C I Host offers turnkey services ranging from initial domain name registration to custom dedicated servers for e-commerce on today's Web. The company offers innovative packages and services to the Internet community.

C I Host operates three diverse data centers across the United States, with its main facility and Network Operations Center in Bedford, Texas. C I Host also has offices in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and London.

All telco-grade, tier-1 data centers are wholly owned and operated by C I Host and consist of redundant diesel generator backups and a temperature-controlled secure environment with fully redundant UPS capability. All server hardware is fully tested and configured for optimal performance. Daily Web server backups and full fire protection guard against any data loss. To deliver speed and reliability, C I Host's servers are connected to two OC-12 fiber connections, five DS-3 and two OC-3 lines from five diverse Internet backbones for a total of more than 2,000 Megabits of available bandwidth.

Contact: Nancy St. Pierre C I Host (888) 868-9931 x 9426 nancys@cihost.com http://www.cihost.com