Maximum PC

For hospitals and doctors offices, patient info is supposed to be secure and there are rules to handling patient data which are the HIPAA rules. If you break them you get a fine or lawsuit.

So I got Tigertext for our office, because our doctors wanted to send patient info by text message, which HIPAA doesn't like (these guys got fined $100,000 for doing it:

http://www.hipaatext.com/100000-hipaa-fine-designed-to-send-message-to-small-physician-practices/

So, the way tigertext works is that you can set the messages to self delete after a time, or the administrator can delete all the messages if the phone is lost or stolen.

Are there other apps, software that works the same way for other forms of text/image data transmission like email or bb's?

I would like to see if I can give the doctors total HIPAA coverage for data transmission from their phones.

Any thoughts?

look into a portal site for the practice. depends on your EHR software as to exactly what.

the only thing that goes from us to the patients via email is a notice that we have stuff waiting at the portal. nothing is mentioned as to what.

basic idea is the patient logs into the (secure) portal site to retrieve images, labs, correspondence, etc from the practitioners. from there (if they want) they can download it as pdf or whatnot.

they can also send questions, requests or whatever to people in the practice from the portal.

so, nothing is in emails that is patient data.

Tigertext does absolutely nothing to protect you from a HIPAA violation that regular texting wouldn't. In the eyes of HIPAA, they are identical. In short, texting in any form is not HIPAA compliant. There is nothing else they can do on their smart phones that is compliant, except for video chatting and phone calls with their patients that would even be remotely considered compliant. That includes emails.

This article in ZDNET talks about Tigertext

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/app-fo ... -byod/3226

Since I work in healthcare, and though this thread raises an important issue, and that is using mobile devices to send patient info, and how do you keep it secure. I see how much college students use text messaging, and then they graduate and move into healthcare and other businesses, they will bring texting with them. So I really do think Tigertext and other communication apps will be very important in the future.

Except Tigertext doesn't solve the problem. There were three whole posts in this thread. Could you not take the time to read them before responding?

We will have apps that patients can pull data from. They already exist.