When it comes enacting changes and actions to further improve and innovate the medical industry, ensuring that the new measures comply with HIPAA is a growing concern amongst healthcare professionals. After all, HIPAA is a highly detailed and complicated standard, as anything ensuring the safety of patient information should be: Title I of HIPAA alone protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when the employee loses or changes their job. For this reason, it may seem surprising that a new option on the horizon that could revolutionize the healthcare industry is secure texting, specifically HIPAA compliant texting.
The benefit secure text messaging would bring to the medical industry deals with the simultaneous protection and communication of important information. As anyone who has ever had tried to get a second medical opinion, transfer to a different medical care center, spent a long time in a hospital or undergoing medical care, or even merely witnessed someone going through them can tell you, it can be incredibly difficult and frustrating to obtain and transfer your medical records while keeping them safe. Of course, it is important to ensure that this information remains secure; yet, it is also important that patients and doctors have access to medical records to properly treat, diagnose, and heal various medical situations. Not having access to a patient’s medical records could actually mean the difference between life and death.
For this reason, already-existing technology like secure texting could help healthcare professionals immeasurably: by investing in mobile healthcare applications and HIPAA compliant messaging services, important information could be shared easily, safely and quickly, helping to improve treatment and diagnoses. These mobile health applications could most likely be downloaded to employee-owned devices (BYOD, or “bring your own device”), such as mobile phones and tablet computers, which could then be secured and protected to ensure the safety of the information being shared.
Secure messaging and other related healthcare apps would need to be carefully deployed within the industry in order to be successful: healthcare professionals, administrators, and technological designers would need to work together to create plans in case of loss or theft of the mobile device, implement proper disposal of devices, prevent interception of sensitive information, and make the technology available to persons other than the mobile healthcare technology user. It would also need to be properly designed in order to comply with HIPAA’s security standards. However, if the development and deployment of BYOD and secure texting technology was successful, it could potentially save health care providers money by switching away from current information systems to mobile healthcare technology.
The development of secure text messaging for healthcare is comparable to a study taken in the late 1990s: according to a study by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, Danish doctors reported that they were saving an average of 30 minutes per day by prescribing drugs and ordering lab reports electronically. If switching prescriptions and lab reports to a new form of technology can save a doctor 30 minutes a day on average, just imagine what affect mobile healthcare solutions might have on the way we share medical information, treat and diagnose patients, and more. For more, read this link: www.iqmax.com
