Is Your Medical Answering Service HIPAA Compliant?

Is Your Medical Answering Service HIPAA Compliant?

If you work within the healthcare industry, you already know the importance of protecting medical answering service hipaa compliancepatient health information, but does your answering service? Any third party you contract to help you with client services is held to the same HIPAA guidelines as your own staff. To ensure that you aren’t held liable for a costly mistake, ensure that your answering service isn’t doing any of the following:

Sending Protected Health Information(PHI) to Your Pager

Alpha or text paging is not secure for several different reasons. First, the data that is being transmitted to the pager is not encrypted. It is essentially a short radio broadcast with the information that a specific pager is ‘tuned’ to listen for. Secondly, the pager itself is not protected by a password to protect prying eyes from reading about your patients’ conditions. If the pager becomes lost, stolen or accidentally left on a desk, it is easy for anyone to gain access to the health information. There is also no remote data wiping software for pagers, so once it is out of your hands, all of the information is unsecure.

Emailing You Unencrypted Messages

If you are receiving email with a patient’s health information from your answering service, it is critical that you can confirm it is encrypted. Standard email that is sent from one user’s computer to another is vulnerable at any point along that transfer without email encryption, easily accessible to hackers. Using unsecured emails not only puts the content of the emails at risk but also the senders’ and receivers’ identities. That’s a risk you don’t want to take.

Messaging Health Information to Your Mobile Phone

Many physicians believe if they receive a text message from a third party, like an answering service, they are not responsible for any violation of HIPAA, which is simply not true. Many services do send a patient’s name, phone number and chief complaint via SMS text. The answering service may verify it is encrypted on their end, but if sensitive information pops onto the physician’s screen, it is certainly not secure on both ends. This is where the physician’s responsibility lies. Don’t allow your answering service to send you standard text messages to your cellphone for this reason.

Remember: Being HIPAA-compliant is an active process. Talk with your answering service today to see how they are protecting you at both ends of the communication. And if you aren’t convinced that you’re covered, it may be time to find a new answering service company.

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