HIPAA Blog

[ Monday, March 23, 2009 ]

 

Physician office texting: Here's an interesting story of a physician's office using cell phone text-messaging for patient notifications. Certainly do-able, and probably a cost-saver, but you must make sure you're cellphone numbers are good, you get buy-in from the patients (with easy opt-out), minimize the information flow over the text process (don't discuss test results, just notify of the appointment and not what it's really for, etc.), and keep a close eye on how the process is working; if anything looks funny, check it out and make sure you aren't blasting info where it doesn't belong. I don't think you can encrypt text messages, so that info is almost certainly "unsecured PHI" under the new data breach rules.


Jeff [11:17 AM]

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