HIPAA Compliance: Build a Path Through the Red Tape

If your industry is dealing with loads of regulatory red tape—under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), for example— you can tackle that problem in different ways: You can lobby for changes to reduce the complexity, as the Association for Competitive Technology has done  (opens in a new tab) in recent months, or you can make requirements easier for the industry to manage.

Catalyze  (opens in a new tab), a startup that offers cloud hosting services for medical information, has chosen the latter route, offering all the things it’s learned about HIPAA compliance to the industry in the form of an open-source document  (opens in a new tab) the company has released to Github.

“When we were creating our policies, we found several templates for healthcare providers, but nothing for modern health technology companies,” Catalyze notes. “We spent a lot of time and effort writing our policies, then adapting them to meet the demands of external audits. We don’t want people to reinvent the wheel; trust us, it’s not fun. We also feel a broader community can improve these polices over time, making them better for everybody.”

While you may not be dealing with HIPAA compliance in your own association, trade groups can nonetheless learn a lot from this approach. This sense of camaraderie in information sharing can help make the tough stuff a little easier to swallow.

Shut Up and Let Me Go

Dreaming of a conference? Here’s how to convince your boss to send you: http://t.co/p1Xe5w2gRT  (opens in a new tab) #assnchat  (opens in a new tab) #mpi  (opens in a new tab) #pcma  (opens in a new tab)

— Business and Sports Events Montréal (@MeetMontreal) October 15, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

Speaking of things that aren’t easy, try convincing your bosses to let you hit up a conference you want to attend. That’s a challenge for employees everywhere.

If you have members trying to make the case to attend your next annual meeting, you may want to send them this link from Tourisme Montréal  (opens in a new tab), offering advice on how to convince bosses that the investment is worthwhile.

“Your boss will need to understand that the organization will see a return on its investment—and chances are, it will,” the organization explains. “After all, face-to-face meetings offer tremendous opportunities to individuals and the organizations they represent.”

Bosses aren’t made of stone, but it’ll be easier if you can make the business case. (ht @MeetMontreal  (opens in a new tab))

Read These Links, Too

What kind of story is this line from? “The harder it is to obtain something, the more people want it as a rule.” If you answered “a story about marketing strategies to learn from Bill Murray  (opens in a new tab),” you are a genius.

Android users have a reason to be excited: The operating system’s new version, Lollipop, is on the way, and it’s a big update  (opens in a new tab).

Susan Kare invented a lot of the icons you see every day—especially if you have a Mac. Check out how the graphic design legend works, over at LifeHacker  (opens in a new tab).

(iStock/Thinkstock)