No business venture wants to bear losses or pay heavy financial penalties due to any reason. But many times, business firms get into a situation where they have to pay hefty fines due to violation of rules and regulations. And one of the vital instances of this is non-compliant messaging. Healthcare is one such sector that doesn't allow professionals to opt for text messaging and start texting to their patients. It could again lead to heavy monetary penalties. Thus, before choosing SMS for communication, healthcare professionals should find out if text marketing is HIPAA compliant or not out of concern.
If we talk about text messaging in the healthcare sector, unfortunately, it is not HIPAA compliant. But still, some workaround solutions to make it compliant.
Significance of HIPAA
HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This act intends to ensure the patient's data security and privacy. The ultimate goal of HIPAA is to safeguard patient's health information by ensuring information is safe and stored securely.
While using text message Salesforce for Healthcare, HIPAA doesn't restrict healthcare professionals from sending PHI through text messages for compliant messaging. But by applying texting safeguards, professionals can ensure data security and privacy for compliant messaging.
Instances of HIPAA Compliant Messaging
Appointment Reminders
Doctors or healthcare professionals are the busiest personalities and hardly have free time. Thus, patients have to schedule prior appointments to consult doctors so that they can book a slot to meet an individual.
But if a patient misses an appointment, it leads to a waste of time and income and causes inconvenience to doctors. Thus, professionals can send appointment reminders to reduce no-shows. Also, this kind of messaging would be HIPPA compliant as it doesn't contain any sensitive health information.
Texts for Internal Communications
There can be many instances where an individual needs to communicate with colleagues and co-workers for various purposes. So, as people chat with their family and friends, healthcare professionals can use SMS for internal communication.
More importantly, that would be HIPAA compliant. So, the health industry can use SMS to send organizational updates, announcements, apprise staff about changes in schedule, etc.
Medication Refiling Reminders
Another example of HIPAA compliant messaging is medication refiling reminders. If someone is a regular patient, professionals can send reminders to help them refill medication stock timely, considering the medicine stock of how many days a patient has purchased or doctor prescribed.
So, by avoiding adding any sensitive health information, professionals can easily make text messaging or text marketing HIPAA compliant.
Conclusion
The most important aspect to keep in mind while using text message Salesforce for Healthcare is not to include any personal identifier in your text messages for HIPAA compliant messaging. Also, there must be proper measures to ensure data security and privacy if you're adding any personal health information of a patient in a text to make text marketing HIPAA compliant. This way, health professionals can adhere to texting rules in Healthcare and steer clear of heavy fines and disputes in the future.
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