Understanding the Incident Response Feature

Accountable provides comprehensive tools for managing privacy incidents and data breaches, ensuring organizations can respond quickly and compliantly:

• Incident Management Software: Offers a structured, HIPAA-compliant approach to reporting, tracking, and resolving security incidents. Employees can easily report issues (including anonymously), and administrators gain real-time visibility through a centralized dashboard.
• Automated Data Breach Detection & Risk Scoring: The system continuously monitors for suspicious activity across digital assets, leaked credentials on the dark web, and unauthorized PHI exposures. It alerts organizations immediately to potential third-party breaches affecting employee accounts.
• Proactive Security Alerts and Automated Responses: When an employee's credentials are compromised, the system notifies impacted employees and prompts necessary actions like password changes.
• Audit-Ready Documentation: All incident logs include timestamps, and reports are securely stored, providing clear documentation essential for compliance reviews, regulatory reporting (like under HIPAA's Breach Notification Rule), and audit support.
• Guided Response Workflows: The software guides users through documenting events, assessing risk, determining reportability, and following required notification steps, standardizing responses and reducing human error.

Features

Precise Incident Timestamps

Every incident includes a chronological timeline that captures:

• When the incident was reported (+ contextual fields)
• When response actions began
• When the issue was contained or resolved (auto-populated when closed)

Department-Level Tracking

Incidents can be tagged with one or more departments (IT, HR, Billing, Clinical, etc.):

• Filter dashboards by department
• Automatically assign multiple investigators based on department tags

Fully Customizable Incident Fields

Admins can extend incident forms with custom fields: text inputs, date pickers, file attachments, and number inputs

Category-Specific Response Plan Steps

Each incident category can be assigned its own custom response plan:

• Configurable checklist steps
• Completion tracking
• Automatic logging of who completed each step and when
• Ordered steps
• Assign steps to investigators + notifications

Complete Incident Audit Trail

A dedicated audit log now records: incident creation, field changes, comments, file uploads, status changes, and response step completions. All entries show who did what and when, and appear both on the incident and global audit log. Logs are fully immutable.

Severity Levels

Admins can assign severity levels (Low, Medium, High) to help teams prioritize triage and investigations.

OCR Classification Field

You can flag HIPAA-impacted incidents that may require regulatory reporting.

Dashboard Redesign

An Incident Dashboard that includes:

• Total incidents
• Open & recently closed incidents
• Average days to resolution
• Incidents by severity, category, or type
• Deadlines & upcoming tasks

Templates for Incident Types

Admins can create templates for each incident type (Lost Device, Phishing, Ransomware, etc.) optionally including custom fields and checklist steps.