About 32% of Americans have tried telehealth services.
The innovative service is helping more and more people access quality health care in a timely fashion. A lot of states are jumping on board, making telehealth call coverage mandatory for many insurance providers.
How do things stay HIPAA compliant when you’re a virtual patient? Healthcare providers follow a system of secure communication practices to protect your information.
As a new medical office, you may want to hold off on conducting telehealth calls until you have a strong compliance program in action. What is the best approach for protecting patient medical data? Read on to find out.
Staying On Top Of Electronic Medical Records
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There are 3 different types of electronic medical records. To maintain your HIPAA Compliance standing, you’ll need to ensure each system can handle a cybersecurity audit.
The first system is called an EMR, and it stands for the electronic medical record. EMR systems let medical practitioners keep a record of the patient’s visits. Within the EMR, you’ll be able to find all of the information you need about patients’ treatments, complaints, and more.
Next, you’ll need to keep a secure electronic health record or EHR. The EHR uses a broader infrastructure to include information from various medical centers. The EHR helps enrich the EMR by adding different information pieces about the patient’s overarching situation.
Finally, there’s the personal health record or PHR. Insurance companies provide the PHR. The PHR gives you the ability to keep track of the patient’s health information using a special interface.
The types of information you’ll find in the PHR include personal data entry, medical information filled out by the patient, and personally collected data.
New Medical Practice Day Forward Scanning
One of the ways to keep patient medical data safe is with a day-forward scanning approach. They forward scanning gives you the ability to access papers using a convenient EHR setup. Instead of struggling between the old documents and the new ones, day-forward scanning takes a proactive organizational approach.
You can also look into backfile scanning. Backfile scanning helps when you need to convert a bulk amount of archived files. Simply choose what files need to be added to the digital database, and upload as necessary.
OCR Programs
You can also look into getting an optical character recognition program, or OCR.
An OCR is a type of data extraction service. You’ll always have the information you need, and it’s only a quick keyword search away.
One of the biggest benefits of OCR approaches is that you can easily edit patient data, helping you keep the most up-to-date records. These systems take a while to integrate though, so be patient.
Protecting Patient Medical Data
Now you know the best practices for protecting patient medical data. Your office needs secure filing structures if you’re going to stay HIPAA compliant. We suggest taking an advanced digital approach to keep up with growing patient demands.
Begin to familiarize yourself with the different EHR setups today. You’ll find that it’s a lot easier to keep track of the old and new documents when you have a digital picture of your patient’s medical history.
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