HIPAA-Friendly Online Bookkeeping

Quickbooks has many features to simplify business invoicing and bookkeeping. While this software is effective in a variety of industries, it isn’t recommended for medical billing. Since deductibles, cash payouts, insurance invoices, and co-pays include patient health information, you should be cautious before entering this information into Quickbooks until you know that Quickbooks supports HIPAA compliance.Some medical clinics use Quickbooks for summarizing revenue and sales receipts. This tool can be a powerful way to track revenue by company, insurance, or even patient category.You might want to avoid using Quickbooks for patient demographic data, information about physical or mental health conditions of patients, health care services offered to each person, or payment for medical services. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, medical practitioners shouldn’t use non-compliant software services for the above information if there is “a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual.”If you are in the healthcare industry and use Quickbooks, you should use caution before inputting “individually identifiable health information” into this software.

Xero offers useful financial and accounting tools for healthcare businesses, such as expense management, inventory tracking, and more. While Xero is designed for the business management side of the healthcare industry, its website does not state that its tools enable HIPAA compliance.Xero offers the option to link to third-party healthcare apps for HIPAA compliance features, such as practice management and appointment scheduling.

FreshBooks provides security and reliability safeguards that seem to align with certain HIPAA requirements, such as 256-bit SSL encryption and firewalls to protect stored data.While FreshBooks’s digital and physical security features seem to comply with HIPAA standards, there is no mention of HIPAA enablement on the company’s website. The company also doesn’t offer information about obtaining a signed business associate agreement (BAA), which is a requirement for covered entities under HIPAA.Since FreshBooks doesn’t specify what its security protocols are for protected health information (PHI), covered entities should consider other invoicing software options.