What Should You Understand About HIPAA Compliances In Medical Answering Services?

The new guidelines that were released under HIPAA regulations created quite a stir everywhere. This led to a lot of confusion. In this article we will explain the different HIPAA regulations and the importance of being compliant.

Medical professionals work hard day and night. They have the incredible burden of saving lives on their shoulders. To fulfill those expectations, they need to be as free of other responsibilities as possible. One of the responsibilities that come with owning a medical office is answering the calls and providing customer service. Those jobs are often passed on to a company who provides professional answering services for medical offices. This results in the overall development of the medical office and ensures that lives are being saved by an enhanced patient care system in place. However, HIPAA recently caused a lot of changes. Here, we will go into detail about all the recent changes introduced to this act and how it can affect your medical answering service provider.

What Is HIPAA?

HIPAA is fully known as Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996. The updates that were made in this act were aimed to improve the privacy and security of the patients or the protected health information (PHI). PHI can include all the information related to the patient like his or her medical condition, the payments made, and other personal details. To get answering services for medical offices is not the hard part. However, finding an answering service that is HIPAA compliant can be a difficult task.

How Does HIPAA Affect The Medical Answering Services?

Due to the updates that were made in the act, there will be a major change in how the personal information of a patient is disseminated. This would mean that many changes would need to be made to disseminate the information of the patients. Those various changes are mentioned below.

1.Encrypted Messaging

Various messages are delivered by the medical answering services. To ensure that those messages are safe, they would need to be encrypted. This will mean that the personal information of the patient remains secure and nobody can hack that data. You can now get answering services for medical offices that have a system that allows them to send these encrypted messages to the patients.

2.Restricting Emails

It is hard to encrypt emails and to ensure that they remain protected. Hence, the phone answering services are not allowed to send any personal information of the patient through emails.

3.Secure Website

The patients tend to access the sites of a medical office they are getting themselves treated at. Hence, a medical answering services provider would further need to provide safe access to their website for all their medical clients.

4.TLS Connections

TLS is more fully known as Transport Layer Security. Due to the changes made in the HIPAA act, the medical answering services would now also need to establish secure TLS connections with all their medical clients. This guarantees the privacy and also protects data of a patient or client.

It is important to remember that all these changes in the HIPAA are made while keeping the privacy and the data protection of medical patients in mind. This is all the major information one needs to understand about HIPAA compliance in medical answering services.

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