Chat Offers Welcome Alternative to In-Office Visits During Brutal Flu Season

When the yearly flu vaccine cannot compete with the dominant strains of the flu, incredibly high numbers of individuals come down with various forms of influenza. It’s important to realize that some of this flu spread occurs directly within doctor’s offices, despite precautions that offices take. The flu requires vigilance and quarantining in order to truly curb its spread, and HIPAA-compliant chat can be a major method for giving medical information without increasing the risk of the flu spreading.

The Aggressive Flu of 2017-2018

After the flu season began in the fall of 2017, doctors, other medical professionals, and hospital networks began to notice that the rates of flu-like symptoms were astronomical. By February, according to Fortune, 4000 Americans were dying of influenza per week and the number of cases were as high as the 2009 swine flu epidemic.

These statistics form a healthcare provider’s nightmare: after careful preparation and stocking of a flu shot, the people in their care are still getting sick and sometimes dying. With complications like pneumonia possible and likely, many otherwise able-bodied adults choose to try to soldier through their illness without rest, which is resulting in more deaths among the typically hardiest segment of the population. Since the flu has sent more people to the hospital than in any recent years according to The Hill, hospitals are strained to be able to care for everyone who is in need of medical care while still providing all their typical kinds of care.

In addition to being especially virulent, the flu can sometimes linger in populations for longer than the typical 16-week flu season. According to the NY Times, the spike in cases and hospitalizations has been precipitously higher than other years, especially at the end of January and beginning of February. All of these factors remind hospitals and medical providers that illnesses can be unpredictable and flexible systems are essential to be able to cope with this uncertainty.

One way that new cases of flu-like illness are being treated now is through chat solutions that allow sick patients to reach a doctor or nurse directly from the provider’s website. Doctors and nurses can evaluate the state of the patient via a real-time chat conversation before giving advice and transmitting electronic prescriptions through to the patient’s pharmacy.

Advantages of HIPAA-Compliant Chat

When aiding those who need medical care for flu symptoms, it is often best for them to rest, drink fluids, and perhaps take a medication like Tamiflu. Getting these simple items taken care of can be the difference between a few sick days and a serious medical complication, like a pneumonia infection.

These life-giving, simple treatments are all items that can be explained and prescribed via HIPAA-compliant chat services online. Telemedicine delivers valuable care for mildly to moderately ill people who will, in the end, only visit the doctor’s office to verify their flu symptoms and receive a medication prescription. If flu victims can stay home, rest, and have someone who is well fetch their medicine, the risk of others becoming infected goes down dramatically.

Even intake procedures can be done on a computer without making someone take a trip to the doctor’s office. Live chat features can provide the rigorous security required to protect medical information by the HIPAA laws while scaling to the amount of clients that a particular healthcare provider needs. Features like live chat allow offices to minimize wasted downtime while maximizing their total patients treated and healed, all in the context of a personalized solution that fits with their particular demographics.

Severe Flu Cases Benefit from Chat, Too

You may be wondering whether live chat is helpful in more critical flu cases. After all, the most severe flu cases require constant monitoring and attention from doctors, and there have been substantially more hospitalizations from the flu this year than in an average year of the flu season. These patients need to be seen quickly by a doctor, given life-saving treatment, and receive treatment if flu leaves them susceptible to other complications and illnesses.

The existence of HIPAA-compliant live chat is actually helpful even for these cases. When someone with severe symptoms goes to the doctor or hospital, they often face enormous lines of others who need help or they have trouble getting an appointment. With live chat, the line time goes down: after all, more mild cases will be seen quickly and easily by whichever nurse or doctor on the line can take some quick time to greet them, without them ever having to wait in a germ-filled waiting room.

These time-saving solutions make it possible for severe symptom cases to be seen more promptly in person. If someone isn’t sure about their symptoms, they can save money and time by using live chat first, and a doctor or nurse can quickly determine if their case merits a visit to the office or hospital. This means that the entire system flows better if mild cases are quickly resolved with online chats rather than office visits.

End of this Road, Preparation for the Next

Many doctors and hospitals are breathing a heavy sigh of relief as the CDC declared that cases and deaths from flu have eased in recent weeks. However, on the heels of this good news come the worries: how to make sure that offices and hospitals are prepared when a new widespread illness brings many contagious people to the office waiting room? Forward-thinking doctors and nurses are choosing to incorporate a live chat telehealth component because they know that it can save lives.

When people with compromised immune systems visit the doctor, it is to their benefit if only a few others are there at a given time, with most contagious but non-severe illnesses contained at home in a form of self-quarantine.

Not only does telemedicine allow people to recuperate with a minimum of disruption, they also keep more severely ill people out of contact with their viruses. The flu varies in its levels of virulence, but medical professionals are more equipped to stop its spread when HIPAA-compliant chat services are offered.

History of Telephone Triage and Telemedicine

Telehealth nursing has grown in popularity with the growing reliability of both video chat and instant internet chat options, despite having existed as a telephone-based service since 1989 formally. In the past 30 years, phone lines where nurses could help diagnose simple conditions and give patients advice for non-life-threatening issues were practical: rather than going to the trouble and expense of going to the doctor’s office or hospital, nurses saved themselves and the patients time by confirming whether or not the symptoms merited a visit. HIPAA-compliant messaging solutions are becoming more popular among generations that spend more time typing conversations via phone or computer than physically talking on the phone.

With the addition of new technology options, substantial benefits are being realized and popularity is growing. In a world where people are generally short on time and where doctors offices are often booked months in advance, a telehealth live chat is becoming the most convenient and valuable way to handle common illnesses and minor injuries.

Benefits of Modern Telehealth Nursing

The new video and live chat features for telehealth nursing increase some of the options available for remote triage. The obvious benefits of telemedicine begin with some simple truths:

• Diagnosis from home means that an ill person need not venture out, exert themselves, and possibly spread a contagious condition.
• Diagnosis is possible without the expense of getting to a medical facility and can be queued up from home rather than in a waiting room.
• Nurses can be in any location, allowing them to work from home or take calls when they are between other tasks at a work facility.
• Patients whose conditions require rest and perhaps pain relief but no other intervention are calmed quicker and reassured that they are correctly managing their injury or illness.

The new technology adds new features that increase the range of conditions in which a nurse line is valuable, while giving them tools and connections that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

• Video chat gives a greater range of information, from readouts on heart monitors to examination of injuries, than a simple phone call can offer.
• Live chat can retain a record of a conversation that would not be possible with a typical phone call.
• Internet systems allow nurses to mark whether they are available or unavailable to take a call and can route new video and live chats to the next available nurse, cutting down on wait times and on necessary operator intervention.
• Internet connections can streamline the process of sending prescriptions from the same hub that offers a telemedicine line, and often these systems also allow for an email of the nurse’s recommendations to be sent to either a caregiver or the patient themselves.

Common Use Cases for Chat for Telemedicine

Nurse triage lines have been very commonly used in relation to on-the-job injuries: if a non-serious injury seems like it merits some advice, a telehealth call may be all that is necessary to get advice on how to elevate, ice, or bandage an injury and move on with the work that must be done. It saves valuable hours for both workers and employers, while ensuring that workers who have been injured do not further injure themselves by returning to work too early. Telemedicine is offered as a part of a medical insurance package at times in order to prevent costly visits and long waits at hospitals and doctor’s offices. A telehealth nurse can give instructions for bed rest and can recommend over-the-counter medications for those who are ill with a contagious but not life-threatening disease, minimizing the time they spend outside spreading the illness.

For bedridden or otherwise remote clients who need evaluation of their vital signs, it is possible to have someone on-site gather information like glucose levels and blood pressure and have a remote nurse make decisions about how the patient is faring and whether a change needs to be made in their daily regimen. On the other hand, crisis situations where getting the patient to a medical facility can also benefit from telemedicine. Using a video call, a nurse can help to diagnose the severity of an issue and can help with dispatching emergency help while also keeping onlookers calm and helping to walk them through emergency care for a person who is inaccessible at the moment, such as a hiker in a remote location. The widespread availability of robust mobile data plans has increased the amount of area in which physically remote locations can still receive instant access to health advice.

HIPAA Compliance in Live Chat

When HIPAA (U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) went into effect, it became essential that all Protected Health Information be shared only with need-to-know health providers in a very specific way on computers that ensured data security. Many solutions offer live chat and video chat features but are not HIPAA compliant. For this reason, telehealth providers must seek out HIPAA-compliant messaging solutions and other technology that meets their stringent security requirements. If patients are transmitting sensitive PHI (protected health information) and health insurance over the internet, they must also be assured of the security of that information.

Incorporating a New Telehealth Tool

Though many resources exist, not all of them work for all telehealth providers. When you are looking at incorporating a new technology, it is important for it to be compliant but also personalized to the needs of your services. Personalized assessments are a must before choosing a new live chat option to provide valuable information and resources for your clients and for the nurses who will be working a telehealth chat feature. Messaging solutions are increasingly diverse in their implementation, and avoiding penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA make it well worth the effort to understand the needs for your system. Download our Guide to HIPAA-Compliant Chat to learn more about choosing a secure, compliant messaging solution.

Protecting patient information is of the utmost importance for healthcare organizations

If you are partially or fully responsible for managing a business in the healthcare industry, you are no doubt aware of the importance of protecting your patients’ information. HIPAA laws have serious implications when broken, but it is not just the legal aspect you should be concerned with.

Patients care about their information being safeguarded even when they don’t fully understand everything involved with HIPAA legislation. Here are 2 reasons why HIPAA compliance matters to your patients:

1. Patients want their medical history and problems to stay confidential.

Although patients may have close friends and/or family that they share other information with, they generally don’t want them knowing their full medical history.

Of course, an individual’s privacy is always important. However, patients may care even more about their records staying confidential when their medical history involves one or more of the following:

• Emotional or mental illnesses
• A history of abuse (whether physical, sexual, emotional, etc)
• Pregnancy, miscarriage, etc
• STI’s or other infections and/or communicable diseases that may impact relationships with others
• A history of drug/substance abuse or other addictions
• Diagnosis or symptoms of a terminal illness that hasn’t yet been disclosed to loved ones, professional colleagues, etc

A patient’s medical records being made known to others could result in damaged relationships, embarrassment to the patient, and/or in extreme cases even jeopardize someone’s safety (such as with instances where an individual experienced abuse).

2. Patients need to trust that any PHI (Protected Health Information) they provide will not be compromised.

While the medical history portion of a patient’s file needs to stay secure, so does any additional PHI they provide. This includes such things as a person’s date of birth, social security number, home and mailing address, phone number, marital status, payment information, and even employment information. If a staff member were to let it slip that a specific person is a patient, that could in itself be a violation of HIPAA legislation if the individual this is told to hasn’t been listed on the patient’s information release form.

When it comes to conversations between staff and other individuals, (including other patients that receive medical services,) patients should never have to worry that their name, information, or records will be mentioned.

Additionally, a patient should have peace of mind that any physical or electronic records are secure and will be kept that way. Both patients and medical providers have legitimate reasons to be concerned about this.

Data breach is more common than you may think

For instance, according to the website for the US Department of Health and Human Services- Office for Civil Rights, there are currently over 300 medical companies in the US alone being investigated for breaches reported in the last 2 years.

What may surprise you is that many of these breaches under investigation were not the result of information being intentionally released. For several of these, the type of breach is listed for reasons such as theft, hacking, and/or IT incidents, some of which compromised thousands of patients’ data.

It is possible in some of these cases that the individual(s) responsible for stealing information were after patients’ personal (not medical) information and they could even intend to scam individuals using data they accessed.

Unfortunately, it would be reasonable to conclude that in addition to known violations, there are likely many more healthcare companies who have experienced breaches that have not been reported.

Regardless of what information is accessed by unauthorized individuals or the exact reason why, patients definitely don’t want to worry about their information being ‘out there.’

3 Tips for Protecting Your Patients’ PHI

We discussed a couple of reasons why HIPAA matters to patients. Now you want to do your part to keep their protected health information safe. Here are 3 things you can do.

1.) Make sure any electronic records have maximum security.

This may involve not only encryption/passwords, but also things such as not leaving computers or devices that have access to patient info unattended or in an insecure location. You may also want to find a good IT company to work with and ensure your website/system is under a secure firewall to protect against hacks.

2.) Make sure patients are aware of their rights and that they understand HIPAA-related forms they sign.

Some healthcare facilities now have the ability to use electronic signatures for forms patients need to sign. If your company is one of them, you want to make sure that staff is adequately explaining to individuals what they are signing, instead of just saying, “alright, I need 3 signatures on the pad.”

Patients should never have to ask what they just signed. Additionally, they should be offered a physical copy of any HIPAA-related forms they sign electronically, especially the first time they are asked to sign it. (Of course, when using physical forms, you likewise want to make sure patients clearly comprehend what they are filling out.)

It’s important to have a legal HIPAA release form on file for patients to list physicians, family members, or other individuals they permit their information to be released to. Make sure they understand what this release form entails in terms of what information can be released, how it can be released, and to whom it can be released.

For example, you want patients to understand that by listing their doctors, you are able to send these physicians relevant records, or that by listing their spouse, you can speak with them on the phone about your patient’s test results, etc. If possible, it’s good to specify on the form itself how information can be released.

If patients don’t fully understand the role of a HIPAA release form they fill out, they may inadvertently give permission for you to release their information to someone they actually wouldn’t want to access it.

3.) Make sure staff is fully educated on HIPAA policies, and provide ongoing training and reminders.

Employees won’t follow HIPAA guidelines if they don’t thoroughly understand them and take them seriously. In order to properly train your staff, you will first need to make sure you completely understand how HIPAA laws affect your unique healthcare practice. It is also paramount to understand how HIPAA laws affect the types of technology solutions your organization uses, such as chat software. A personalized assessment with HIPAA-compliant chat specialists will help you better evaluate your HIPAA-compliance needs when it comes to messaging solutions.

By providing additional training to your employees from time to time, you can keep them updated on any changes to the HIPAA Privacy Rule that affect your company as well as remind employees of proper procedures. Companies also have the option to enroll employees in HIPAA training programs facilitated by third-party training services.

You’ll also want to make sure staff is doing their part to keep physical and electronic records secure and that they promote a work environment that protects patient information.

By staying informed, by educating your staff and patients, and by taking proper precautions, you can succeed in keeping your medical business HIPAA-compliant.

How Technology Affects HIPAA Regulations

With the advent of the internet, privacy concerns about confidential information are front and center. No one wants his or her private information spread across the internet, especially when it comes to health information. This is one reason why HIPAA laws were enacted and why their policies are so important to businesses. People want to know their information is secure when dealing with any institution. Furthermore, businesses who don’t follow HIPAA regulations are subject to hefty fines. Exchanging information over the internet is a common way that companies conduct business. Whether it’s healthcare providers or insurance companies, protecting your communications with clients is a top priority. Companies that are HIPAA compliant and use HIPAA compliant software will ensure their customers’ privacy and rights.

What exactly is HIPAA?

HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It contains a series of laws that were passed in 1996 that outlines how companies must transfer healthcare information. It also states that health care coverage should follow a person when they change from one job to a new job. The HIPAA laws did not occur all at once; new additions were implemented over several years. The initial law was enacted in 1996. Within the HIPAA statute, there are five titles. However, for the purposes of this introductory article, we will only be mentioning the first two and focusing primarily on Title II.

Title I

This section is entitled “Health Care Access, Portability, and Renewability.” This part of the law enables insured members to carry their health coverage when leaving one job and going to another. It also provides specific laws concerning pre-existing conditions.

Title II

This section is entitled “Preventing Health Care Fraud and Abuse” and it includes the privacy and protection laws for patients. Title II is also sometimes referred to as “HIPAA Administrative Simplification” and it consists of five separate laws that were enacted at different times. These laws include the Privacy Rule, Transactions and Code Sets Rule, Security Rule, Unique Identifiers or National Provider Rule, and the Enforcement Rule. To understand the implications and necessity of HIPAA for organizations within the healthcare vertical, let’s take a brief look at its history.

History of HIPAA

In 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was enacted, however several additions were made to the law in the following 20 years. Besides making health insurance more portable (meaning employees could take health insurance with them to their next job), the other main goal of this law was to simplify the “administration of health insurance.” The latter portion is where the additional privacy and security laws came into play. The procedures enacted to simplify the administration of health insurance helped lead to the computerization of medical records. Before this time, patient records were in paper format, which means they stayed contained in one location.

Whereas once patient health records were transferred to electronic form, they could be potentially spread across the world and accessible to virtually anyone if protective measures were not put in place. It was obvious that additional laws were needed to ensure patient privacy and security. In 2003, the HIPAA Privacy Rule was signed into law. The set of rules established under this law affected healthcare providers, health insurance companies, health clearinghouses, and health billing departments. The Privacy Rule ensures patients have certain rights as it pertains to their healthcare information. These rights involve who is allowed to access or view their healthcare records. Healthcare professionals must put guidelines in place in order to ensure they adhere to the rule. Guidelines may include:

• Developing internal privacy methods to make sure the patient’s information is safe.
• Training employees on how to use the methods and educating them about what the rules are.
• Providing patients with their privacy information rights.
• “Securing patient records containing health information.

In 2005 the HIPAA Security Rule was enacted. The security rule is similar to the privacy rule in that it keeps the patient’s information safe from those who should not have it. The security rule is a set of standards that ensures a patient’s information is protected electronically. Institutions must take measures to ensure the electronic security of the records they handle. Some of the technical safeguards that companies use to ensure they are abiding by the HIPAA Security Rule include:

• Encryption of data
• Cloud storage that is compliant
• HIPAA secure messaging
• Compliant mobile applications

Why is HIPAA so important?

For institutions, HIPAA compliance is critical because violations can be costly and severely problematic for your company. The fines can range in the thousands of dollars and some people even face imprisonment if they willfully disregard the law. People who discover their privacy was violated may file a formal complaint, which is then investigated. In addition, the Office of Civil Rights conducts comprehensive audits. Here is a look at the HIPAA violations chart from least offensive to most offensive:

• The person did not know they were in violation of HIPAA.
• The person did not willfully violate HIPAA.
• The person willfully neglected the HIPAA rules but did make corrections in time.
• The person willfully neglected the HIPAA rules and did not correct it.

The fines range from $100 to $50,000 for each violation. As more and more records become electronic, institutions that work with these records will need to develop a system that protects the sensitive digital information. According to the HIPAA violation’s chart, ignorance is not an acceptable excuse. The fine may be smaller, but it’s still counted as a violation and fined accordingly. Keeping patient information safe remains a top priority for all businesses handling healthcare records and other sensitive PHI (protected health information).

Many providers prefer to use messaging services as a tool for patient engagement and to relay information. Using a messaging service with live chat availability is convenient, yet it’s paramount to ensure the chat software is HIPAA compliant. SnapEngage proudly offers a HIPAA compliant messaging solution that makes live chat secure for healthcare organizations and other businesses that handle PHI. Our secure messaging service will keep your organization HIPAA compliant while you boost your patient communication efforts. For more information about incorporating SnapEngage HIPAA solutions into your growth strategy and to receive a personalized assessment, please contact us.