5 HIPAA MYTHS THAT CAN WRECK YOUR PRACTICE

Myth Four:  You should not send emails to patients who have unsecured email, and if an office sends you an unsecured email, you risk a fine or HIPAA violation by using the information for treatment purposes.

Reality:  While the fact is that most offices have complete control over what they send out, they typically have very little control over who the recipient allows to see the email, when, where or how it is read, or the security of the patient’s email server.

The obligation of any office is to secure what is sent.  HIPAA requires only that practitioners send emails from secured systems.  The message must be protected from your end.  You cannot protect it on the patient’s end, any more than you can control how another office sends information to your office.
 
“Securing what a private, unregulated individual receives is pretty difficult,” says HIPAA expert Jim Moore.  “That is not the practitioner’s obligation.  I would urge offices to remind their patients that how these emails are stored and accessed is the patient’s problem, rather than the doctors’.  A lot of patients tend to forget this fact.”
 
Next week, we’ll finish up with another email topic.  If you send an email to a doctor and the email goes astray and winds up in another doctor’s inbox, how much trouble can you expect