Physician Conundrum: To Text or Not to Text? – Part 2
Smartphones have become a vital healthcare tool; but unsecured text messaging does not meet HIPPA regulations, placing physicians at potentially serious legal and financial risk. That risk prompted the Cooperative of American Physicians to recommend that its members not use smartphones to text protected health information. As we pointed out in our previous post, we […]
Physician Conundrum: To Text or Not to Text?
Smartphones have made communication and collaboration between healthcare providers faster, easier and more effective. Consider the following statistics: 80% of physicians use smartphones at work. (mHealth Watch) 43% of doctors use smartphones to reference drug data and 31% use their phones to make prescribing decisions. (MobiHealthNews) However, despite the obvious advantages smartphones offer, California’s Cooperative […]
Go for the Gold: Productivity Tips from Olympic Athletes
The Olympic flame may have been extinguished in Sochi, but the amazing feats of athleticism we witnessed will linger in memory. Athletes don’t achieve Olympic perfection without years of hard work and an ability to maximize their productivity. From the effort Sochi Olympians put into their quest for gold, we can learn some valuable lessons. […]
New HIPAA Rule Gives Patients Direct Access to Lab Reports
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) continues to tweak HIPAA privacy rules. Most recently HHS strengthened patients rights to lab report access by allowing laboratories to give completed report results directly to patients or their designated representatives. The new rule, which supersedes all state laws, goes into effect April 7, 2014 with laboratory […]
Two Key Features of HIPAA-Compliant Text Messaging
Locking in a secure text messaging service is considered one of this year’s top health IT priorities by medical offices, clinics and healthcare providers. A fast and convenient method of sharing patient information, text messaging has become the medical community’s preferred method of consulting between colleagues about patient care. Sharing patient information by text allows […]
New Call-Forwarding Assurance Service Minimizes Medical Office Liability
Call Forwarding Assurance is one of three new limited-scope services MedConnectUSA has just begun offering to meet the needs of medical offices and healthcare providers that do not require full-service call answering and messaging services. Each of our new services Ready Assist automated phone answering, Voice Mail and Call Forwarding Assurance — addresses a specific […]
New Voice Mail Service Expand Call Answering and Messaging Options
MedConnectUSA has just rolled out a trio of exciting new medical call answering and messaging services. Our new Ready Assist, Voice Mail and Call Forwarding Assurance services are designed to offer cost-effective communications options for healthcare providers and medical practices that require only limited call answering or messaging services. While limited in scope to meet […]
Save on Medical Call Answering Services with New Ready Assist
We are pleased to announce the launch of MedConnectUSA’s new Ready Assist medical call answering service. A unified communications platform, Ready Assist features a completely automated answering system with the added security of operator back up on an as-needed basis. Designed to meet the needs of smaller medical practices and healthcare offices that do not […]
How to Avoid HIPAA Double Jeopardy
Medical practices healthcare providers and their business associates may be faced with a double jeopardy threat now that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asserted its right to prosecute data breaches by entities subject to HIPAA regulation (see our previous blog post). The FTC ruling makes it possible for a breach of patient information to […]
Who’s Enforcing HIPAA?
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) insistence that it has the authority to enforce data security breaches by HIPAA-covered entities has some people crying foul. We tweeted about this issue a few weeks ago when the FTC first stuck its thumb in the HIPAA pie, but it’s worth taking a closer look at the problem and […]
