Why is Medical Text Messaging Becoming So Widely Accepted?
Since President Obama pushed the idea of mobile healthcare solutions when he first entered office and the U.S. Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, the presence of mobile medical applications in the American healthcare landscape has absolutely exploded. More than ever before, healthcare providers can easily share patients’ information via medical text messaging, email, and data virtualization. For healthcare providers, this move is widely seen as a step in the right direction. For many American citizens, however, the rise of medical text messaging is a little worrisome, to say the least.
HIPAA Secure Texting Seen as an Easy Way to Disseminate Information
As the popular tech website Tech Target details, the adoption of medical text messaging and other medical data applications is widely considered to be a good thing within the medical community. Database virtualization, for example, allows doctors to simply log-on to a shared medical information database, retrieving patient information in seconds. This allows for increased quality of care as allergies, medications, injuries, and all other pertinent information can be ascertained, allowing medical professionals to provide better medical care from the get-go. This saves time, and, more importantly, it saves lives.
For Patients, Secure Messaging Services Looked at with Skepticism
Naturally, there has been some concern among Americans that increasingly digitized medicine will lead to HIPAA violations. As Healthcare IT News points out, these concerns aren’t unwarranted, as mistakes in the past have lead to accidental dissemination of information to unauthorized parties.
It’s important to note, however, that thanks to increased government oversight through the HITECH Act and severe financial penalties in the event of a violation, healthcare professionals are staying vigilant when it comes to the proper usage of these so-called “Healthcare 2.0” apps. Nobody wants the $50,000 fine that comes with a single violation, after all.
Are you for or against the recent surge in medical text messaging, emailing, and other methods of sharing information digitally? Share your thoughts in the comment section below. More like this: www.iqmax.com