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Avoid dangerous emailing and texting

 

Herewith a look at legal dangers for healthcare professionals and institutions to avoid when e-mailing or texting vendors and patients.

This  detailed and very useful Medscape entry by lawyer Michael J. Sacopulos suggests:

“The best approach is to keep all electronic communications with or concerning a patient in the electronic medical record (EMR) system. This is done through patient portals. EMR systems generally supply a secure platform for housing and communicating PHI.

“In situations where the use of an EMR patient portal is not possible, use encrypted email or secured text messaging. This will keep PHI (protected health information} safe in transit. For those times when encrypted email or secure text messages are being sent, make sure that they ultimately get into the patient’s chart.”


Far to go on patient-physician digital dialogue

 

email

 

Now here’s an area that if  only modestly improved could probably save everyone a lot of time and money and improve medical outcomes.

A Nielsen survey says that most patients can’t use e-mail, texting and other electronic tools to share, back and forth, medical information with their physicians because many providers don’t offer such access.

The survey polled more than 5,000 Americans ages 18-65 on their technology attitudes and use to manage their medical care. Only 21 percent had  access to online physician-appointment-scheduling;  just 15 percent used email to communicate with their providers, and only 9 percent  got text reminders

“All the functionality that we live our lives on isn’t available in health care. You use your phone every day to send a text message or e-mail; you can’t do that to over 90 percent of physicians. You take a picture, and you want to send it someone; you can’t do that [with doctors’ offices] today,” Robert Pearl, chairman of the Council of Accountable Physician Practices, told The Washington Post.

 


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