HIPAA Compliance Policy

In 1996, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Many provisions of HIPAA became effective in 1997 and AMICAS has already implemented them into our software solutions. The Administrative Simplification provision was developed to reduce the costs and administrative burdens of health care by making possible the standardization of electronic transactions that are currently carried out manually on paper, or in a variety of proprietary formats. This provision of the law required the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to develop standards (also called rules or regulations) for the maintenance and transmission of these transactions. These standards were developed to:

  • Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system by standardizing the interchange of electronic data for the specified transactions
  • Protect the security and confidentiality of electronic health information

Through software enhancements, AMICAS has taken proactive product development efforts to enable our customers to implement HIPAA-compliant security features. Specifically, our software allows our customers to enable these features, policies and restrictions:

  • The ability to set minimum and maximum lengths for user passwords.
  • The requirement of alpha, numeric, non-alpha numeric, upper case or lower case characters in passwords.
  • An established process for the system administrator to require mandatory password changes at set intervals.
  • The ability to lock individual workstations.
  • The capability to audit user activity.

AMICAS software enables functionality, which when properly configured and implemented, allows AMICAS customers to be fully compliant with all pertinent aspects of HIPAA. AMICAS endorses the security standards raised by HIPAA and is committed to enabling our customers to protect patient privacy. Privacy and security are essential components of our software solutions. We invite you to contact an AMICAS customer service representative at 1-800-490-8465 or info@amicas.com to gain further information on how you can use AMICAS software to enable HIPAA-compliant security within your organization.

Privacy Policy

AMICAS, Inc., providing Web-based, software-only medical and diagnostic image management solutions, recognizes the vital importance of maintaining the privacy of patient-specific information, as well as information about our customers. Our policies and procedures for safeguarding this information are described below:

Information About Our Website — Visitors and Users of Our Web-based Viewer Demonstration

When downloading the demonstration of the our Web-based Viewer, we ask website visitors to provide basic personal identification information. Required fields, noted by an asterisk *, include your name and email address, while other information such as mailing address remain optional. AMICAS, Inc. respects the privacy of the users of its website demonstration. Although we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party, we may, in certain cases release your email address to a third party to provide you with product or service information more closely targeted to your indicated interests. We do not disclose certain pieces of information, such as your password, PIN, or AMICAS, Inc. number. Also, we may use information about you to provide you with offers that we think may be relevant to you, but in these cases we do not disclose any personally identifiable information about you to third parties.

On our site and via email, we may offer you the option to choose to receive electronic information about topic(s) of interest to you from other companies. If you choose to receive information from such companies, AMICAS, Inc. may provide to such companies your name, email address and other pertinent information, if applicable, and the company may contact you directly. These programs are offered as "opt-in" programs, not as "opt-out" programs, meaning you will be contacted only if you choose to participate. We will not pass your name or email address to other companies without your permission, except as otherwise specified in this Privacy Policy Statement.

In the course of using our site and our services, we automatically track certain information about you. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you visit next (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, and your IP address. We use this information in the normal operation of the site and we may disclose this information on an aggregated basis only. We use "cookies" on our site. Cookies are small computer files that we transfer to the visitor's hard drive. This procedure allows us to know how often someone visits our site and the activities they conduct when visiting our site. This information helps us improve our website. You are free to decline our cookies if your browser permits. Associating a cookie with your registration allows you to elect to have our site remember your user name and password, thereby shortening the sign-in process to our Web-based Viewer demonstration site during subsequent visits.

As part of our service, we may send you periodic emails containing information about us, updates on new service features, service usage tips, and information about third party services that are likely to be of interest. By accepting the AMICAS, Inc. Terms of Service, you expressly consent to such use and disclosure of your personally identifiable and other personal information. You can request to be removed from this list by clicking "Remove" on the follow-up email message we send to you.

Protecting Patient-Specific Data Obtained Through Our Relationships with Healthcare Providers

As part of our customer support role, there are occasions where designated representatives of AMICAS, Inc. may have access to patient-identifiable information, subject to our clients' security protocols. AMICAS, Inc. will not release patient-identifiable information to any outside sources without prior permission from our client and the patient. Personally identifiable health information that we obtain through our relationship with other healthcare professionals is stored on our database servers. We have security procedures to prevent individuals from accessing information without authorization. Our data centers are physically secure and protected from unauthorized access. In situations where a particular medical study is made available for educational or marketing purposes by AMICAS Inc., we always annonomize ("scrub") or remove all patient-specific identification information prior to release.