The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC), a nonprofit standards development organization and accrediting body, has launched its Management Service Organization Accreditation Program (MSOAP).

Management service organizations (MSOs) offer centralized administrative and hosted technology services, such as EHRs, to healthcare providers. MSOs ensure that protected health information (PHI) is stored, accessed and/or transmitted in a private and secure manner.

MSOAP accreditation indicates that these centralized data operating centers exceed industry-established standards and comply with HIPAA regulations in areas such as privacy and confidentiality measures, level-of-service and escalation procedures, transaction response times, and systems availability, according to EHNAC of Farmington, Conn. In addition, MSOAP assesses security infrastructure and data integrity measures including disaster recovery, business continuity, contingency plans, and intrusion detection and response.

The program also evaluates transaction processing efficiency, ability to comply with generally accepted industry-standard data formats and audit trail capabilities, EHNAC added.