Which documents fall under HDS certification?

For some years now, HDS certification (Health Data Hosting) has been mandatory for every organisation hosting health data, or reaching it in any way. This administrative requirement is intended to strengthen the guarantee of medical confidentiality, in a digital age where sensitive information can be stored in the cloud. NetExplorer explains everything there is to know about HDS certification and gives you the full list of documents it covers.

What is HDS certification?

HDS (Health Data Hosting) certification is awarded to data centres and to any digital service responsible for storing and processing health data. It is mandatory for any company carrying out one or more of the following activities:

• designing and maintaining sites that process health data,
• designing and maintaining the physical infrastructure,
• managing and operating health data,
• storing health data itself.

The purpose of HDS certification is to attest that the host respects every confidentiality rule required for handling personal health data. It also helps raise the level of security around that data.

Which organisations does HDS certification concern?

Storing patient data securely is a concern for most of the organisations operating at various levels of the healthcare sector. For that reason, every healthcare organisation has to take the steps needed to obtain HDS certification. The organisations most concerned are:

• hospitals,
• pharmacies,
• pharmaceutical companies,
• biomedical analysis laboratories,
• occupational health practices,
• insurers,
• health insurance mutuals,
• non-governmental organisations working in healthcare.

Holding HDS certification also lets you, as a healthcare organisation, gain credibility with patients, because it reassures them that their personal data is in good hands with you.

Which information does HDS certification cover?

HDS certification was introduced partly to meet the requirements of article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that everyone, whatever their status or position, has an absolute right to respect for their private, medical and family life. The files protected by this certification are therefore every document holding a patient's personal information. Several types of data fall under HDS certification.

Data about physical and mental health

This data has to be kept strictly confidential, because it reveals a person's current overall state of health. It must not be reachable by just anyone, because the only person who should decide who sees it is the patient.

The host, or the party responsible for processing this information, therefore has to make sure it is strictly protected against any cyberattack. That is essential not only out of respect for the patient's privacy, but also for their personal safety: certain health information, in the wrong hands, can become grounds for blackmail or worse.

Medical history

This covers data about the patient's past state of health. Medical history also has to be protected strictly, because it belongs to the patient's personal and private life. They alone should decide who knows it. HDS certification is awarded to hosts after verifying the level of security surrounding that data.

Prognoses about future health

This information, usually derived from the patient's history and current health, gives a sense of how their condition might develop over the days, months or years to come. It matters a great deal, particularly where the person has a degenerative illness such as cancer, or a viral or systemic infection.

If this data becomes known, it can seriously disrupt a patient's life. They may be dismissed from their job, refused a bank loan, or find themselves at the centre of a media storm if they happen to be a public figure. It is to avoid risks like these that HDS certification has been mandatory since 2018 for every organisation involved in storing and managing health data in the cloud.

Information about family life

Protecting someone's data can only be fully effective if it also covers information relating to their family. Family data refers to things such as marital status, the number of children, or conditions affecting members of the patient's family. Knowing one or more of these can, in some cases, allow conclusions to be drawn about the patient's own health. To protect the patient completely, this data is therefore also among the documents covered by HDS certification.

Why choose NetExplorer to manage your patient data?

For more than 15 years, NetExplorer has offered reliable ways of securing and managing your data. Backed by our various international qualifications, HDS certification among them, we stand today as one of the solutions best suited to storing and processing personal health data. We also let you tailor your plan so it fits your organisation and the part of the healthcare sector you work in.

Beyond that, we offer tools designed to make sharing your files easier, not only with your own teams but also with your partners and your patients. Through our collaborative platform, you can work through tasks with your teams without having to travel. Create and co-edit your documents remotely, and get more done whatever the workload, with NetExplorer.