WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix are among the most popular website builders and CMS platforms available. An estimated 43.2% of all websites, including healthcare sites, are built on WordPress. Wix ranks a distant second at 2.5% of all websites, followed by 2.0% for Squarespace.
This leads to a critical question for the healthcare industry: are contact forms on these CMS platforms HIPAA compliant?
The answer, broadly speaking, is "No."
Fortunately, there are ways to make contact forms compliant (similar to how to make Google forms HIPAA compliant). But first, it's crucial to understand how to collect, transmit, and secure patient information in a way that meets compliance requirements.
Below, we outline what makes a contact form compliant. Then we reveal the best HIPAA compliant solution when it comes to contact forms and patient data.
Creating a contact form in the healthcare industry involves ensuring that any collected protected health information (PHI) is handled, stored, and transmitted in a way that meets the standards set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Here are the key factors that contribute to making a contact form HIPAA compliant:
For healthcare websites, using contact forms that meet these criteria is crucial.
Often, this means relying on third-party services that specifically offer HIPAA-compliant solutions and rigorously following HIPAA guidelines in every aspect of handling PHI.
No, there are no native HIPAA compliant forms in Squarespace. While covered entities can obtain a signed business associate agreement from Squarespace, this only provides HIPAA compliance for Squarespace Scheduling.
To be clear, Squarespace provides a BAA only for this single service. While Squarespace Scheduling can help patients manage their appointments, any other communication with the organization is not similarly protected.
Healthcare organizations with a Squarespace website must consider using a separate HIPPA compliant online forms builder for their patients.
When using a compliant online form builder, adding a secure form to a Squarespace requires you to embed code for the form, similar to embedding a YouTube video onto a page.
Later in the page, we explain how to build the best compliant forms for a Squarespace website.
Contact Form 7 itself, a popular WordPress plugin for creating forms, is not compliant out of the box. HIPAA compliance involves ensuring that any electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) collected, stored, transmitted, or processed by a service adheres to the strict privacy and security regulations.
Unfortunately, many of these requirements involve configurations and safeguards that extend beyond the capabilities of the Contact Form 7 plugin itself. It's possible to create a more HIPAA-compliant environment around Contact Form 7 (for example, by using additional plugins that encrypt form submissions or by hosting your site on a server that offers HIPAA-compliant security measures), but this requires a careful and comprehensive approach to security and compliance.
Given these considerations, if your website needs to handle ePHI through contact forms, it's crucial to consult with a compliance expert or legal advisor to ensure that all aspects of your site, including how you use plugins like Contact Form 7, fully comply with HIPAA regulations.
No, there are no such things as Wix HIPAA compliant forms. Any organization that needs a compliant form for Wix should look into potential third party integrations.
No. SurveyMonkey, the parent company of Wufoo, suggests opting for SurveyMonkey for the collection of protected health information (PHI). This suggestion implies that Wufoo’s forms might not support HIPAA compliance fully.
For software to be compliant, it needs to implement a variety of safeguards including physical, administrative, and technical measures to secure PHI. Although Wufoo provides certain security capabilities, it seems to lack a comprehensive set of features required for full compliance.
Google is known for its secure services, such as Gmail and Google Drive. However, security is not the same as compliance. The average Google form is not compliant, at least, not immediately.
If you have a Google Workspace account, you can make your Google form compliant in 6 steps. It's not uncommon for a covered entity to work with a Google workspace account partner (IT-service companies) to do this.
Because of the consequences of a potential error, other healthcare institutions choose to look for a compliant service, such as a no-code app builder.
While there are many third party integrations, the best solution is one that you can fully customize.
If you thought the Squarespace platform was easy, no-code is even more intuitive. You can bring your enterprise plan to life by not just creating a custom online form, but by syncing the data with your online database tools.
Blaze.tech enables you to build an online form with all the contact form features you need.
The best part?
Through our intuitive drag-and-drop tool, you can build a web app that securely (and compliantly) syncs data from your website forms to your business systems (EHR, EMR, PHR, etc). You can build everything from patient portals to authorized clinic onboarding forms.
Because our platform is no-code, you can do all of this for your patients without having to write a single line of code. If you can browse a website, you can build a web app. That's why our clients call us the best web app builder in the no-code movement.
Third party integrations give you more opportunities to serve your patients, while making work easier for the users of your web app. You can manage user access, set account-level permissions, and streamline every area of your business.
Interested to learn more about our service?
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