Improving Doctor-Patient Communication While Abiding by HIPAA

Since it was signed into law in 1996, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, has become a cornerstone of American healthcare regulation. While the Act affords many important and valuable protections to patients, the many associated rules can pose compliance challenges to healthcare organizations.

With improving levels of Hospital Patient Satisfaction being such a priority for many organizations today, for example, making progress while abiding by HIPAA can seem overly difficult. In fact, there are actually some entirely HIPAA-appropriate options for hospitals and other healthcare organizations to explore.

Enabling Improved Communication While Keeping Health Records Safe and Secure

One of the most significant HIPAA provisions covers the ways by which hospitals and healthcare professionals must protect the medical records and privacy of patients. Exposing a single patient's medical history publicly could lead to many related problems down the road, from difficulties with securing employment to issues acquiring health insurance.

As a result, hospitals and doctors are required to treat health records very carefully and to secure them against unauthorized access. While this might appear to be a reasonable requirement in general, it can also seem to make related activities more difficult.

One proven way of bolstering Doctor to Patient Satisfaction, for example, is to make it easier for the two parties to communicate. Providing patients with accessible, convenient means of contacting the doctors who care for them is a sure way of making satisfaction much more likely. At the same time, this has to be enabled in forms that will not cause a hospital or doctor to fall out of compliance with HIPAA.

Apps That Respect HIPAA and Open Up New Ways of Communicating

Fortunately, hospitals can now make use of tools that have been designed with both of these major requirements in mind. A HIPAA Compliant Text APP that has recently attracted attention, for example, is designed to ensure full adherence to all the associated regulations at all times.

Even so, the mobile app also makes it simpler than ever before for patients to send updates and concerns to doctors and for the latter to reply. By enabling a much more fluid and informative style of communication, the HIPAA Compliant Text APP makes it much more likely that patients will end up reporting complete satisfaction with the care that they receive. As a result, hospitals can hope to improve this increasingly important metric without ever needing to jeopardize the HIPAA compliance they have put so much effort into establishing.