HIPPA Compliance And Your Transcription Vendor Ð Is Your Transcription Vendor Still Working With FTP And Email? By Rao Atluri At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Medical transcription services are essential for busy hospitals and medical practices, but with HIPAA - the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act - there are some challenges. Digital medical information needs to be protected; offsite access needs to be regulated. While outsourced medical transcription is still common, many facilities have questions about whether or not their transcription vendor is aware of HIPAA security requirements and How well their vendor adhears to HIPPA requirements

Many Transcription companies still use standard FTP and email to transfer voice and data between the healthcare facility and the vendor. This in itself is a violation of HIPAA requirements. Most standard FTP and email tools do not support any encryption. To protect the confidentiality of the data being transmitted it has to be encrypted . FTP and email do not provide such facilities unless additional arrangements like VPN or some form of encryption is tied into these tool, which we normally do not see being implemented consistently.

Bottom line is a vendor using ftp or email for data transfer is a red flag, especially if no VPN is used

Simply put, if the system that a medical transcription company uses is not secure, chances are good that your patients' data is not secure either - and that puts your hospital or office at a risk for fines and criminal penalties, inefficient data transfer, the release of records to the public, and a lack of confidence from the patients that you serve. Fortunately, with Transdyne as your medical transcription company, these are all things that you won't have to worry about.

Rather than insecure and complicate tools like FTP and email, the information that you submit for medical transcription is handeled by secure and simple to use data transfer tools developed by TransDYne., At TransDYne a HIPAA privacy officer ensures that the staff are familiar with HIPAA regulations and compliance issues and then these staff members are trained to utilize the system. Reword the para

Further security measures are then put into place: each application at Transdyne is set up so that only users who need to have access to the files will be able to do so. Further, user IDs are set so that the user is only able to access the information that they need in order to complete their task, and after a period of inactivity, the user is logged off - in other words, if the transcriptionist gets up from his or her desk, no one else will be able to sit down and pull up their files.

These measures help to ensure that the information that you send to the transcription company is secure and that risks are minimized. Further risk reductions are also in place: rather than using subcontractors, all medical transcription done by Transdyne is done at Transdyne. Each employee signs privacy agreements and other contracts that will ensure that, even after they have left the transcription company, your information is safe.

Safety and security are key points for every hospital and medical office with outsourced medical transcription; fortunately, it's possible to know that you can have the work that you need to have completed, done without risking the security of your data. Medical transcription can be performed efficiently with all of your patientdataprotected from start to finish.

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