Mobile Health and HIPAA Compliance

With the unprecedented popularity of mobile devices, there’s no way for healthcare industry to avoid the issue of practitioners using mobile devices for communication that will sometimes include PHI. With that, the first questions that come up are often about HIPAA, and now HITECH, compliance.
Writer Neil Versel spoke with Diversinet’s Senior VP for Corporate Development and Research, Hussam Mahgoub about this issue. Diversinet provides HIPAA-compliant mobile healthcare (mHealth) applications to healthcare providers. “’Many healthcare providers and insurers still are on the sidelines when it comes to transmitting sensitive health information to patients’ mobile phones for a number of reasons,” says a new white paper from Diversinet, producer of a secure platform for developing mobile healthcare applications.

‘There’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace about security and privacy’ …Mostly, providers are a bit scared after recent news that the Department of Health and Human Services fined Maryland’s Cignet Health $4.3 million for denying 41 patients access to their medical records and reached a $1 million settlement with Massachusetts General Hospital after a hospital employee left protected health information about 192 patients on a subway train.”

Read Versel’s full story here.

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