Fragmentation of care occurs when physician communications lack the necessary tools and methods for coordinated healthcare communications. For example, with fragmented communications, communications will break down between emergency department and care centers or between house staff at end-of-shift or between different care departments managing a patients’ needs. Indeed, in a typical scenario, more than 1 … Continued
On a typical chaotic hospital floor, the steady cacophony is deafening. Landlines ring. Overhead paging systems blurt out instructions. Physicians are using their pagers to arrange consults. A nurse is yelling out updates to the coverage schedule. Physician are on the phone discussing a patient’s treatment options. And in the midst of all this … Continued
When healthcare security executives were asked what issues keep them awake at night, survey respondents in a Forrester Research study most often cited the misuse of personally identifiable patient information (86 percent). This fear makes sense given that most hospitals still rely on pagers and insecure communication formats like Facebook and GChat. These formats do … Continued
For a healthcare organization to be HIPAA compliant it needs to ensure that the right controls are in place to protect the privacy of patient information. This means that controls are provided to ensure that sensitive patient information is not left visible to non-relevant parties and that the exchange of information between practitioners follows HIPAA … Continued
Efficiency is more than just an adjective when it comes to healthcare. It can come with significant consequences. In a healthcare context, lacking efficiency spells patient waiting time at best and significant delays in care delivery or death at worse. As such, improving delivery and efficiency of healthcare must be a major priority of providers … Continued
Recent data from the Journal of Hospital Medicine highlights the battle for secure healthcare communications. Unfortunately, the battle is not progressing as well as one could hope. The statistics cited in the Journal’s July 2017 publication cite the following statistics: Almost 80% of clinicians continue to use pagers. It is the most commonly used technology by hospital-based clinicians … Continued
Voted Top Healthcare Messaging App! Medical Technology Schools lists OnPage as one of the 10 most useful clinical communication apps. According to the article, OnPage: Combines the function of a phone and messaging service with HIPAA-compliant security for a fantastic communication model in any healthcare setting. Healthcare is increasingly realizing the penalties it pays by … Continued
What is HIPAA secure messaging? A definition. HIPAA secure messaging means that the exchange of patient information – often referred to as protected health information (PHI) – between physicians, nurses and hospital employees is exchanged via a secure and encrypted platform which adheres to the mandates of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. … Continued
Interoperability describes the extent to which systems and devices can exchange data, and interpret that shared data. For two systems to be interoperable, they must be able to exchange data and subsequently present that data in a manner that can be understood by a user. Typically, this exchange is thought of in terms of how … Continued
The threats posed by unencrypted pagers We recently had a chance to interview Adam Greene, a lawyer in Washington D.C. with the firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. One of Adam’s most intriguing cases occurred in 2014 with a hospital client. This hospital’s doctors and staff used pagers to routinely communicate about a patient’s status or … Continued