Secure Text Messaging From Your Call Handling Service

Posted January 22, 2013 in medical answering services, secure messaging by admin

Why is secure text messaging important? Well, In the United States, about 113 smartphones go missing each minute (that’s 160,000 a day!). If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have lost a smartphone in the past, you know how frustrating it can be. Not only have you lost your phone, but most likely a large amount of personal information which can be easily accessed by anyone with less than honorable intentions (even if you’re one of the few who actually utilize the phone’s security features!).

The Important Part – Liability

For most of us, losing a smartphone is an inconvenience. But for a doctor, it can be a major liability to his or her practice. In the past few years, smartphones and other smart devices have become critical tools for doctors to communicate with office staff, hospital staff and other doctors in regards to their patients. However, losing a smart phone for them can also mean losing sensitive patient information, putting them in violation of certain health information privacy laws as established by HIPAA.

Keeping Information Secure

Secure text messaging is becoming one of the key tools to help doctors’ offices and other medical providers stay compliant. Since most smartphones are easily ‘broken into’, the strongest types of security for messaging are those where the messages are not actually stored on the device itself. There are a few applications on the market (including the one we use) that are designed specifically with the needs of medical providers and HIPAA compliance in mind. These apps give doctors and other authorized personnel access to their secure messages through their various devices without actually storing those messages locally on the device. When implemented properly, this all but eliminates the non-compliance liabilities for medical practitioners in the event of a lost smartphone.

A Comprehensive Plan

In the medical world, secure messaging is a bit more complicated than most other professions. On one hand, you need to keep your patients’ information secure. On the other hand (to ensure the best care), you have to enable other participants in the care process to communicate accurate information for each patient. This may include your medical office staff, hospital staffers, insurance providers, specialists, nurse practitioners, referring physicians, and your call handling service for overflow and after hours calls; just to name a few. The secure messaging process chosen by your practice must be flexible enough to accommodate the various participants in patient care, keep patient information secure, and still be user friendly enough to ensure all participants at the practice will abide by the new procedures.

Don’t Take the ‘Wait and See’ Approach

If your practice does not already have an effective secure text messaging solution in place, we suggest reaching out to your call handling service as a good starting point. A quality answering service provider deals with confidential messaging on a 24/7 basis and should be able to provide you with some direction to help your practice become compliant. If your call handing service is unable to help you with a secure text messaging solution, it may be time to upgrade services to one who can. It only takes one incident to draw attention to lack of compliance with HIPAA, yet this is one liability that can be easily eliminated by taking a few additional actions to update your messaging procedures.
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