Physician answering Services – Building Trust in Information Confidentiality

For physician answering services the demands are challenging.

They need to be in service 24 x 7 x 365, be HIPAA compliant, and ensure every call is handled professionally, securely, and accurately.

These demands are certainly not unwarranted because professional answering services who deal with patients and doctors have to be exacting in their line of work.

Most important of all, physician answering services must be HIPAA compliant; because this singular prerequisite goes all the way in building trust among patients and medical professionals.

It is true being compassionate and courteous at all times and being available 24 X 7 is demanding in itself, but the requirement of the medical profession to keep patients’ details private, even from their kin can be quite trying.

Yes, this is what HIPAA compliancy is all about and there can be no compromise on this issue. 

HIPAA, after all, offers federal protection for personal health information held by individuals and provides them with a set of rights with respect to that information.

This privacy requirement applies to all forms of health information of the individual whether in oral, written, or electronic from. The Federal Law that accords privacy to health protection in electronic form requires that entities covered by HIPAA must ensure the information is secure.

The entities covered include health insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid, certain government programs, healthcare providers, and also entities that process standard and non-standard health information.

A contracted phone answering service is covered among entities because as per law the agency processes or facilitates processing of health information.

As such all the operators and staff of physician answering services must undergo HIPAA training on an ongoing basis.

Here are some specific tasks medical answering services perform to ensure HIPAA compliancy.

• All systems are made secure by double password protection
• All client and patient information in the form of messages and voice information are maintained in an encrypted electronic form on onsite storage vault accessible by multiple keys maintained by different staff
• Multiple level data back-up storage – On site as well as off site
• By keeping redundant power sources and back-up offices

The above goes to demonstrate how important it is for medical answering services to develop expertise and skills to protect patient health information.

Good physician answering services do a lot more to ensure trust. They keep implementing new security measures on a continuous basis to build confidence among callers and clients.