The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC), a nonprofit standards development organization and accrediting body, launched its Management Service Organization Accreditation Program (MSOAP) on Tuesday.
Management Service Organizations (MSOs) offer centralized administrative and hosted technology services, such as electronic health records, to healthcare providers. They ensure that protected health information (PHI) is stored, accessed and/or transmitted in a private and secure manner.
MSOAP accreditation indicates that these centralized data operating centers exceed industry-established standards and comply with HIPAA regulations in areas such as privacy and confidentiality measures, level-of-service and escalation procedures, transaction response times, and systems availability. MSOAP assesses security infrastructure and data integrity measures including disaster recovery; business continuity; contingency plans; and intrusion detection and response. The program also evaluates transaction processing efficiency; ability to comply with generally-accepted, industry-standard data formats; and audit trail capabilities.
“With health information technology adoption on the rise, accreditation programs such as the one developed for MSOs provides true confidence to healthcare providers in the organizations with whom they are working. MSOAP ensures that these organizations comply with industry-established standards for a wide range of necessary privacy, security, confidentiality, accountability and efficiency in healthcare transactions,” said Lee Barrett, executive director of EHNAC.
“State regulatory agencies such as the Maryland Health Care Commission (MHCC) understand this need and value of such and are embracing MSOAP accreditation as a state requirement. We are actively working with additional states to implement similar programs,” he said.
