Healthcare IT - According to Spy Glass Consulting,
94% of doctors are using their smart phones for business communication via SMS and email. This puts hospitals in a difficult situation because they don't have the resources to automatically archive and retain these messages as they are sent from these mobile devices. As a result, physicians must manually upload their data to the storage service or archive. Not only is this an inefficient use of doctors' time, but manual archiving runs a severe
risk of not fully complying with HIPAA regulations. This can subject a hospital to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Without the right solution, the uploaded data can easily be deleted or lost if not archived and indexed properly. Spy Glass reported that "critical communications easily fall through the cracks." So to answer my question, "does texting without archiving qualify as medical malpractice?" I'd say yes, because according to this report, one of the easiest ways a doctor can put his hospital at risk, is to communicate through their smart phone with no archiving! My money was on shoddy brain surgery.
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Since the emergence of cloud based services, there have been waves of doubt crashing on the shores of service providers world wide. We at Sonian continue to challenge the dissent and doubt directed at the misunderstood potential of the cloud because we, as well as our pioneer customers, know that cloud based technology and virtualization is the future of IT innovation.
Two days ago, on July 19, 2010, the following story broke on boston.com; South Shore Hospital, in Weymouth, MA had lost the personal information for roughly 800,000 people while in-transit to a contractor for destruction. The information on the missing files included; names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, medical record numbers, patient numbers, health plan information, dates of service, and information on diagnoses and treatments. This incident, which no one seemed to have anticipated or even considered as a possible outcome for the data destruction process, has proven itself to be a disastrous scenario. Because of this misstep, South Shore Hospital will be facing federal fines & penalties for non-compliance ranging from $50,000 to $200,000, but that isn't even the worst of it….
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA Privacy & Security Rules) provides federal protection of all health related information and provides patients with certain rights regarding the privacy of their personal information. These rights include, but are not limited to, the required consent before information is shared or distributed. If one feels their rights have been violated, that individual may file a complaint with their provider or health insurer, or file a complaint with the U.S. Government.
In the worst case scenario, the South Shore Hospital has subjected themselves to up 800,000 personal complaints against them, and must handle 800,000 individual settlements, not to mention the additional non-compliance fine. If South Shore Hospital had chosen to store their data within the cloud there wouldn't have been a need to transport and destroy that information. Using the infinite scalability and unlimited storage capacity the cloud offers, along with the proper indexing and archive service, these records could be stored for long periods of time without fear of data overload while still having the capability to be accessed instantly from multiple locations. Because the cloud can provide safe and secure storage for sensitive data for long periods of time, in addition to helping organizations comply with regulations such as; FINRA, SEC, HIPAA, and SOX, there is no need for data transit or destruction, and thus crisis averted for South Shore Hospital.
Download the Webinar: Meeting the HIPAA Compliance Challenges with Cloud Archiving to learn how you can protect yourself from data disasters like the one that happened to South Shore Hospital.
Jason Hiner posted on his Sanity Check Blog this article The 10 biggest headaches of 2007 for CIOs and IT managers. 2 of the Top 10 IT concerns relate to themes near and dear to Sonian’s raison etre: Storage and Compliance.
8. Storage Creep
With an increasing body of data going direct to digital and larger multimedia streams being a more frequent part of the data load, storage needs are exploding for lots of organizations. Many of them have designed their data systems for scalability, but even those are being stressed much sooner than expected in many cases. The storage crunch will not abate any time soon. Beyond just throwing more resources at the problem, there is a sore need for better storage optimization solutions to handle all of the duplicate data on most networks.
5. Dealing with Compliance
From HIPAA to Sarbanes-Oxley to FERPA to PCI, compliance issues have engulfed many IT departments and have taken a big bite out of IT budgets because of the staff resources it takes deal with compliance. Many IT departments are struggling with how to integrate compliance activities into regular operations and/or get additional funding for compliance activities.
Contact Us to request a free Compliance Toolkit!