Welcoming Slack to the Healthcare Industry

If you’re like me, you’re pleased to learn that Slack Technologies is expanding its exceptional service to the healthcare industry and is ready to meet the sector’s HIPAA requirements. For healthcare pros, physicians and organizations, this means that they can use Slack’s mobile app and desktop platform to securely share PHI and other sensitive medical records—this is huge news for the industry!

With great excitement, I’ll now report on what’s known (so far) about Slack’s expansion into healthcare and what it means for today’s care facilities.

Slack’s Expansion Into Healthcare

Slack is venturing into new territory with its recent healthcare expansion. According to Healthcare IT News, Slack announced that it achieved HIPAA compliance. For Slack, the move means that it can benefit from and cater to a lucrative, $3.5 trillion dollar healthcare industry. Additional benefits of Slack’s healthcare expansion include:

• The company’s ability to match and meet competitors’ offerings (e.g., Stitch)
• Streamlining communication(s) between care teams and groups
• Providing documents and records for everything that’s messaged within hospital walls

Also, the move ensures that all Slack communications meet GDPR regulations via the introduction of additional Slack-based tools, guaranteeing that personal data remains protected to meet expansive privacy laws and requirements.

Slack’s Enterprise Grid is eventually expected to fully comply with and support HIPAA regulations. For healthcare facilities interested in the product as it exists today, Slack requires that organizations (1) have a minimum of 250 users and (2) recognize that at the moment, Enterprise Grid only safeguards PHI through attachments and not direct messages.

Enterprise Grid will provide several key features for healthcare practitioners, guaranteeing that work communications become streamlined and efficient. Product features will include data loss prevention, data encryption and remote sign-out capabilities. These features, alongside other capabilities, will be fully accessible and HIPAA-compliant in the upcoming months.

A Powerful Addition to Slack

At this point, you may think that Slack’s move into healthcare can’t get much better. Well, there’s more. Through Slack’s integration with clinical communications platforms such as OnPage, the service can provide additional features including, but not limited to, real-time priority alerts (i.e., high or low-priority notifications), SSL encrypted two-way messages, on-call schedules and alert escalations.

With this type of integration, healthcare providers can use Slack for both casual and high-priority alerting purposes. Most importantly, this means that caregivers can receive immediate and intrusive, audible alerts that notify them of important care team-related issues. Also, the integration ensures that all alerts are always addressed, as critical notifications are received through a smartphone app—and not through an overly cluttered and frustrating communication tool like email.

Slack’s integration with clinical communications platforms elevates internal and collaborative messaging, ensuring that channels for critical messages work more efficiently and organized!

If you’re still wondering about the benefits of the integration: don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. With a Slack-clinical communications platform integration:

• Physicians can receive on-time alerts to quickly tend to patients and save lives
• Missed alerts will be escalated to the next qualified doctor or practitioner in-line for continuous care delivery
• Care teams can improve workflow communications through two-way messaging features
• All channel communications are HIPAA-compliant and secure including, text messages, images and voice attachments
• Doctors can receive alerts regardless of location or range due to Wi-Fi and cellular compatibility

Elevating Slack With OnPage

Of course, we’re selfishly excited about our integration with Slack and being able to take advantage of these new capabilities. Slack’s healthcare users can use OnPage as a reliable and robust clinical communications solution! Setting up the integration with OnPage is an easy process that only requires an app authorization and credentials via the Slack-OnPage console. From there, users can immediately leverage the integration for important clinical exchanges.

Slack’s expansion into healthcare is an exciting move and OnPage is there to complement its powerful capabilities, creating a beneficial relationship that makes hospital workflows easier and more productive.

Want to learn more about Slack’s integration with OnPage? Contact us or reach the sales department directly at sales@onpagecorp.com.