The Farmington, Conn.-based Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC), a non-profit standards development organization and accrediting body, announced the launch of its Management Service Organization Accreditation Program (MSOAP). Management Service Organizations (MSOs) offer centralized administrative and hosted technology services, such as electronic health records, to healthcare providers. MSOs 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.
In addition, 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.
EHNAC recently launched its HIE accreditation program and certified the Utah Health Information Network (UHIN).
