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Protected Health Information, File Sharing and Email

HIPAA featured

Protecting patient information is a crucial and necessary part of healthcare… but so is communicating effectively with patients. Considering that email continues to be the most common form of electronic communication, it stands to reason that providers meet patients where they are. 

However, HIPAA regulations have rather strict requirements for protecting PHI, and plain email just doesn’t cut it. Here, we’ll discuss how to effectively use email to engage with patients without breaking compliance.

 

HIPAA Regulations for PHI

HIPAA regulations revolve around securing the privacy and confidentiality of Protected Health Information (PHI). While the entirety of the law defines practices and requirements to this end, four specific rules are incredibly important for the purposes of discussing email and file sharing. 

These four rules are:

These rules are the most relevant when discussing file sharing and emails containing PHI. 

 

The Problem of Email, File Sharing and HIPAA

One of the major challenges of providing information to patients is that your organization must maintain privacy and confidentiality regardless of the communication channel. Unfortunately, most common forms of sharing information (email, file-sharing platforms, etc.) aren’t secure out of the box. 

Adding to the challenge of sending data securely, you cannot guarantee that your patients use secure technology themselves. While this may seem like the patient’s responsibility and not the business, it’s enough to know that HIPAA does not see things in that same light

The reality is that encrypting emails isn’t enough–HIPAA also requires that healthcare providers restrict PHI access, monitor PHI’s movement, and ensure PHI integrity, all of which are near impossible without 100% control over how communication technology is used. 

For example, when it comes to email, there are several options that your organization might consider:

 

Best Practices for Email and HIPAA

While there are several pitfalls to using email to communicate with patients about their healthcare, it would be silly to avoid the medium altogether. It’s far too common and important a media channel to ignore to avoid using it to the detriment of your patients. 

With that in mind, there are several key best practices that you can follow to maintain security and compliance while emailing patients:

 

Ensure Secure Servers for HIPAA Compliance with Continuum GRC

The best foundation for a PHI-sharing system is to have compliant, secure technology on your side. This means that you have to have robust and ongoing compliance auditing and risk management to meet your obligations to both regulatory organizations and patients. 

With the Continuum GRC, you can unify and centralize your HIPAA compliance and risk management to ensure that all your systems are secure, including patient-facing communication portals. 

 

Worried About Sharing PHI with Patients?

Continuum GRC is cloud-based, always available and plugged into our team of experts. We provide risk management and compliance support for every major regulation and compliance framework on the market, including:

And more. We are also the only FedRAMP and StateRAMP authorized compliance and risk management solution in the world.

Continuum GRC is a proactive cyber security®, and the only FedRAMP and StateRAMP Authorized cybersecurity audit platform in the world. Call 1-888-896-6207 to discuss your organization’s cybersecurity needs and find out how we can help your organization protect its systems and ensure compliance.

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