As HIPAA requirements for allowing patients electronic access to their health information are now in effect and as patients increasingly come to depend on electronic communications, there are new demands for communication via e-mail and texting. How can HIPAA requirements for privacy and security be reconciled with patient requests for information provided by e-mail and text messages? This session will discuss the differences between professional communications and patient communications and how they must be treated to best serve patients, most efficiently enable communications and remain within the bounds of HIPAA compliance.
E-mail has long been a staple of people’s lives, but as we move into the new digital age, texting is often the preferred or sometimes the best way of communicating. Doctors and medical offices are finding that texting is far more flexible, convenient and effective than paging and patients want to be able to use short message texting for handling of appointments, updates and the like, where even e-mail or the telephone would seem inconvenient. Communicating with patients’ cell phones via texting or voice call for purposes of payment and even for providing healthcare information requires consent and using texting for official purposes still remains outside the bounds of physician orders. These issues must be considered when evaluating the use of texting and e-mail for all kinds of communications.
In order to integrate the use of e-mail and texting into your communications, it is essential to perform the proper steps in an information security compliance process to evaluate and address the risks of using the technology. This session will describe the information security compliance process, how it works and how it can help you decide how to integrate e-mail and texting into your organization in a compliant way. The process, including the use of information security risk analysis, will be explained and the policies needed to support the process will be described. There has long been a HIPAA requirement for covered entities to do their best to meet the requests of their patients for particular modes of communication and using e-mail or texting is no exception.