Latest telecommunications technology solutions and services have been improving overall performance and efficiency of organizations considerably but at the same time raise some serious concerns about protection of privacy with data transmission, and medical facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes are no exception.
Voalte, a provider of advanced clinical communication technology solutions that enable medical professionals to utilize the best out of their time and efforts has launched its new white paper that takes a deeper look into how healthcare staff members of a hospital can contact each other through secure text messaging. The company develops enhanced applications that can be run through touch-base interface of smartphones.
Titled ‘5 Steps to HIPAA-Compliant Texting,’ the new document analyzes how mobile accessibility plays a vital role in the healthcare industry today, and also takes into account the issue of patient privacy that needs to be ensured while the exchange of patient data is made among various official members of a hospital as most of the medical facilities now bank upon mobile technologies such as smartphones for interpersonal communication. Further, the whitepaper focuses its attention upon the Health Insurance Portability and Accountable Act or ‘HIPAA’ Security Rule that sets primary guidelines about maintenance of confidentiality of electronic protected health information or ‘ePHI.’
The document offers five basic principles that if followed properly, can yield considerable protection in terms of ePHI within medical organizations, and the first one among them is that every sent, received and stored data must be duly encrypted so that non-authorized users are not able to access the private information about the organization. Similarly, every health professional that requires access to the data must be provided with a user ID and password for logging in to mobile devices, and all the smartphones of these professionals must be able to be managed remotely through various mobile device management software solutions so that in case of mobile phone theft or loss, the vital and sensitive patient information can be controlled and erased off the device.
Similarly, the white paper suggests that when they are not being used, the smartphones within medical organizations must be locked and securely stored, and a risk analysis must be carried out at regular intervals so that effective strategies can be developed in accordance with HIPAA recommendations.
In October 2013, St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, CA, announced that it has recently deployed several Amcom solutions to enable its staff to exchange information more easily and securely. The hospital is currently utilizing Amcom’s online staff directory and on-call scheduling solutions with the latest version of the Amcom operator console. St. Joseph Hospital is also using Mobile Connect, to provide HIPAA-compliant texting for staff.