{"id":116290,"date":"2025-12-11T13:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T18:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/?p=116290"},"modified":"2025-12-11T13:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T18:08:08","slug":"hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/","title":{"rendered":"HIPAA Compliant Partnering for Small Business Communications"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-116291 size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-1024x684.jpeg\" alt=\"Doctor making a call on a mobile phone.\" width=\"1024\" height=\"684\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-1024x684.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-768x513.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-1536x1026.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-scaled.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>S<\/b><b>mall Healthcare Practice? HIPAA Facts and Critical Considerations<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is an important compliance requirement for organizations both small and large. Any organization that either produces Protected Health Information (PHI) or handles PHI produced by other organizations is accountable under HIPAA. If you are a covered entity (CE) or a business associate (BA) as defined by HIPAA, you need to be compliant with these regulations. Let\u2019s start with some basics.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">CEs include any organization that directly provides healthcare services, such as <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">doctors, dentists, clinics, pharmacies, mental health practitioners, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses. BAs include IT services (like Phone.com), billing companies, cloud service providers that host PHI data, consultants, lawyers, or auditors with access to patient data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Who Enforces HIPAA?<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For smaller organizations, there are many misconceptions regarding HIPAA.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We are too small to be on the radar for HIPAA enforcement.<\/span>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2025, financial settlements and civil penalties issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of Civil Rights (OCR) ranged from $10,000 to $3 million.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This included accounting firms, fitness facilities, and communications services providers (Alder, 2025) .<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No organization that addresses public health information is too small!<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Only the Federal Government can impose fines for HIPAA violations. Not true. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Actions against HIPAA-covered entities and business assocates can also be brought by state attorneys general. Penalties range from $100 per incident to a maximum of $25,000 per year, per category (Alder, 2025).<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Health Breach Notification Rule addresses the exposure of health information not covered by HIPAA reporting requirements. For example, the FTC found that failure to notify consumers about the impermissible disclosure of personal and health information to third parties such as Google and Facebook was actionable, and GoodRX settled the investigation for $1.5 million. An online counseling service settled the investigation with FTC for nearly $8 million for the same reasons (Alder, 2025)! These are serious \u2013 and avoidable \u2013 costs!<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Phone.com and HIPAA Compliance<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Phone.com has been providing unified communications as a service (UCaaS) to small businesses since 2017. As a Business Associate (BA), Phone.com provides our healthcare customers with a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). This ensures that, if a breach occurs, our customers can be confident that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/industry\/healthcare\/\">HIPAA privacy and security rules have been followed<\/a>. This includes an annual review of all related systems and training validation for all employees. When a HIPAA breach is suspected or reported, an investigation determines if proper actions and compliance have been followed. Phone.com is a valued and informed partner for our healthcare customers. HIPAA compliance and avoidance of fines and penalties is a team effort, requiring the participation and continued diligence of each organization.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>References<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Alder, S. (2025). <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Healthcare data breach statistics<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hipaajournal.com\/healthcare-data-breach-statistics\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">https:\/\/www.hipaajournal.com\/healthcare-data-breach-statistics\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Small Healthcare Practice? HIPAA Facts and Critical Considerations The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is an important compliance requirement for organizations both small and large. Any organization that either produces Protected Health Information (PHI) or handles PHI produced by other organizations is accountable under HIPAA. If you are a covered entity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":116291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10393],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-learning"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.7 (Yoast SEO v26.7) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>HIPAA Compliant Partnering for Small Business Communications - Phone.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Phone.com has been providing unified communications as a service (UCaaS) to small businesses since 2017.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"HIPAA Compliant Partnering for Small Business Communications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Phone.com has been providing unified communications as a service (UCaaS) to small businesses since 2017.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Phone.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/phonedotcom\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-12-11T18:08:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-scaled.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2048\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1368\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@phonedotcom\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@phonedotcom\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dr. Joel Maloff\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/#\/schema\/person\/62dfdea732cad68bd461373eb2d9eb0f\"},\"headline\":\"HIPAA Compliant Partnering for Small Business Communications\",\"datePublished\":\"2025-12-11T18:08:08+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/\"},\"wordCount\":469,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AdobeStock_886169956-scaled.jpeg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Learning\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.phone.com\/hipaa-compliant-partnering-for-small-business-communications\/\",\"name\":\"HIPAA Compliant Partnering for Small Business Communications - 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