HIPAA Blog

[ Thursday, October 21, 2010 ]

 

Medical Telemetry via Smartphone? Sprint has an app for its EVO 4G phone that will allow doctors to receive information from hospital monitor information remotely. They say it's HIPAA compliant, but I wonder: is it encrypted somehow? What if the doctor loses his smartphone? If the doctor is in surgery, someone in the OR is probably going to be answering his phone for him; will they have (not necessarily proper) access to this data?

Generally, having more access to data is good, but I'm not sure you can be absolutely certain that the HIPAA aspects are "compliant."

UPDATE: on this post (as with all others), click on the time-stamp below to see comments.

Jeff [10:05 AM]

Comments:
in short-no- the encryption is not sufficient, but there are ways to show due diligence in protecting that data. You are definitely asking the right questions! We have to be smart about balancing the "availability" of data with the "protection" of data. A major problem is that, by nature, most health care providers are not suspicious (protection issue) but are technologically inquisitive and not afraid to purchase time-saving, smart "apparati" (availability issue). Thanks for caring about our privacy as your clients/patients. I am on somewhat of a "crusade" to help folks become more aware of very simple, electronic/cyber/physical "best practices" we can all do to protect that private information.
The problem is that my oversuspicious nature risks ostracizing those who really need to tune in. -Dave www.swicetech.wordpress.com
 
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