Fostering HIPAA Compliance and Saving Time with Secure Texts
Do your healthcare employees text? Careful – this could be a serious HIPAA compliance problem. According to SearchHealthIT, nurses and physicians are likely already using the unsecure text-messaging apps that come with their personal smartphones to communicate at a quicker pace.
"If you don't provide a communications system, they will find one, and they're going to use it, regardless," said Sally Reeves, healthcare project director at Frisbie Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.H., in the article. "Things happen too quickly now in hospitals, and information needs to be distributed at such a fast pace in order to coordinate the next thing that's needed. We're under such constraints to get patients out in certain periods of time. They only have so many hours or days here based on their diagnosis, so you have to be speedy in getting results back, setting up the next test, all of those types of things."