Though the Physician Perspective blog was fictitious, RHIOnet is being used in the healthcare industry by providers (similar to Dr. Stephen Miller) and by payers to achieve these benefits. In this blog, we introduce you to Robert Lane, the healthcare electronic data interchange (EDI) analyst with HealthNow NY. HealthNow NY played a leadership role in forming a consortium of Western New York health insurance plans and hospital providers, WNYHealtheNet, an online community health information network accessible by local physicians other health care providers and health insurance plans. WNYHealtheNet delivers over five million healthcare transactions per month to its more than 30,000 providers and provides real-time, online services including health plan eligibility and benefit verification, claim status, claim inquiry, referral submission and single sign-on. Prior to WNYHealtheNet’s inception in 2002, physicians were required to contact each entity individually, in disparate ways, for all the services and manage multiple sets of user names and passwords for each entity.

In this blog, learn from Robert Lane how RHIOnet has made a difference for WNYHealtheNet.

How do payers involved with WNYHealtheNet typically use RHIOnet?
We use it as a tool to help our organization and our provider community reduce administrative costs. Our consortium has weekly calls to discuss various issues, and RHIOnet helps facilitate these calls by offering a view into the administrative information we have for our payers. We have a group of payers who use RHIOnet, and we all contribute to WNY HealtheNet. Because of our shared costs, our providers can go to one Website and get information for multiple local payers.

How has RHIOnet simplified or changed the payer workload?
RHIOnet has helped significantly reduce the number of phone calls we received about transactions and also has reduced the amount of paper we use. Because of the simplified and lessened workflow we’ve experienced by using RHIOnet, we’ve been able to do more work with less staff. Most importantly, we’re able to bring more information to our provider community faster and more efficiently.

What challenge(s) were you trying to meet before choosing RHIOnet?
Before RHIOnet, our provider call centers experienced a high claim volume. The solutions has reduced that volume and has greatly cut down on the amount of paper we use, which in turn reduces our storage costs. RHIOnet provides a great way to meet HIPAA standards completely and cost-effectively.

As a consortium, what were the key elements you were looking for in a solution?
Cost was our number one factor, but we also wanted to implement a solution that was easy to use and allowed us to meet the needs of the ever-changing healthcare environment.

Can you reveal any specific ROI/savings that has/have resulted since implementing RHIOnet?
With RHIOnet, it costs us less than one penny per transaction to process HIPAA transactions, which is especially notable because we receive over 300,000 eligibility transactions per month. These savings help us reduce our overall shared costs and also produce FTE savings.

How did RHIOnet increase the productivity of your organization as a whole?
Many of the transactions we process are for eligibility, and before RHIOnet, those transactions were handled through phone calls. RHIOnet is heavily relied upon here in WNY! The providers in our consortium love it, and it adds a lot of value to their day since they can access one site instead of multiple payer sites. They can perform an eligibility transaction to all the payers in the consortium, and each responds. It’s a huge time saver for our providers.

Can you provide an example of a situation that was affected positively by your use of RHIOnet?
Through RHIOnet, we are able to perform two additional proprietary transactions, provider inquiry and response and provider demographic. The provider inquiry tool allows our providers to submit inquiries via RHIOnet to submit adjustments, and we’re able to respond electronically. This has been a huge success for providers that use it and has reduced costs for some of the smaller offices by providing costs savings through reduced postage and freeing them up to do other work in their office. We’re getting rave reviews on those features! RHIOnet has really opened the line of communication between our payers and our provider community.

My name is Dr. Stephen Miller, and I am an internal medicine physician in the Chicago area. I knew I wanted to be a doctor when my favorite thing to do as a child was play the game Operation over and over…and over. When I wasn’t busy trying to use tweezers to relieve the patient’s wacky ailment in the game, I used my toy stethoscope to “diagnose” my friends’ symptoms and even had my own office and staff. After high school I attended the University of Texas Medical School in Houston and spent countless hours honing my trade. I endured many sleepless nights and the constructive criticism of many experienced physicians before earning my degree and moving to the Windy City to start my practice.

What makes me different from many of my colleagues is the technology I use to enhance the care I provide to my patients, specifically RHIOnet, which connects providers and payers to administrative and value-added services by serving as the community portal for all communications. For example, after receiving the notification about my patient from the ER last night, I was able to access the HIE’s Community-wide Provider Portal from home this morning before heading to the hospital to which my patient was taken. The call I received last night was to notify me of the patient’s arrival, not to ask me to rush to the hospital, which a lot of my colleagues would have to do. To deal with this patient’s “emergency,” the first thing I did this morning was log into the RHIOnet community-wide provider portal. Since I was logging in from my home which is not on the trusted network, I received a text with a second password to log into the provider portal. This use of a password to access the portal is called Two Factor Authentication or 2FA and is important because I wasn’t logging in from a trusted site like the hospital

By logging into the portal,I was able to access the clinical system to see if the lab results for my patient are ready before I head to the hospital. Even though I’m not part of the same hospital network as the ER, I was able to see the patient’s results because the ER doctor and I both belong to the same HIE. Something else that allowed me to access my patient’s records was the fact that the patient had previously granted consent to share his personal health information. Though electronically sharing personal health information through the HIE is intimidating for some people, many of my patients have provided their electronic consent on a tablet in my waiting room after viewing educational content that I created using the Story Builder. The Story Builder facilitates the ability of users to increase their comprehension of a topic through interactive multimedia, allowing patients to understand what it means to sharing their information with the HIE and be able to make an “informed choice.” 

Once I arrived at my office at the hospital, it was the usual rush, rush, rush pace familiar to doctors in this setting. After allowing myself a couple minutes to quietly enjoy my cup of coffee, I once again logged into the Community-wide Provider Portal to check my day’s appointments. Since the portal utilizes single sign-on which allows me to use one password to access my patients’ clinical records, administrative transactions and many of the other services I require, I don’t have to spend unnecessary time trying to remember which of my five children’s birthdates I used as passwords. Also, my office uses a known and secure connection, so I didn’t have to use the 2FA process.

I don’t want to bore you with a lot of technical information, but let me share a couple more instances in which my use of technology provided me a significant advantage. I like starting out my day with a happy patient and my first patient of the day was very satisfied that the process of dealing with the insurance portion of his visit was taken care of ahead of time. If you’re wondering how the process that many patients abhor can be completed ahead of time, it was the ability of our EMR system to use the Direct Connect feature of RHIOnet to process the patient’s eligibility verification and co-pay. With another of my patients today, once I determined that he needed to see a specialist for his continued kidney pain, I was able to use another administrative transaction available through RHIOnet to submit a referral using its intuitive Web-based interface.

The time savings and ease-of-use of RHIOnet may not seem significant to you, but adding all those extra minutes up sometimes means the difference between leaving my office in time to see my son, Sam, play the beanstalk in his school play and having the chance to put my kids to sleep by comforting them with the fact that yes, they probably will see their team win a Word Series unlike many of their Cubs fan friends. Whether it’s being able to access a patient’s records from home instead of having to endure the blustery Chicago wind and snow to drive to the hospital or being a bright spot in a patient’s day by eliminating some of the insurance hoops through which they have to jump, RHIOnet and the benefits it provides offer a noticeable advantage in my workflow and, therefore, my patient care.

APP Design’s RHIOnet solution serves as a community-wide provider portal. RHIOnet provides Two Factor Authentication (2FA) and connects to existing clinical applications and practice management systems. The single sign-on feature of RHIOnet enables users to connect seamlessly between clinical systems, HIEs, payers and third party services such as faxing or transcription services for a streamlined approach to electronic data interchange. By using single sign-on to access services such as e-consent, eligibility and claims status, RHIOnet lowers costs and reduces administrative burden by lessening the burden placed on help desks, improving payment collections, reducing data entry errors and increasing workflow efficiency. 

*This account is a fictional but accurate portrayal of physician use of a Community-wide Provider Portal.

One such feature is the single sign-on capability. By implementing single sign-on through the portal, authorized users can access multiple services, such as clinical systems, administrative transactions, and value added third party services, with one location and one password. Users no longer have to spend valuable time searching for a Website or password, providing an easy, yet secure way to access these sites. By shrinking the need for help desk calls due to lost passwords, single sign-on reduces costs and increases user satisfaction.

Furthermore, as an imperative security measure, community portals should offer Two Factor Authentication as a means to gain access to sites not on a certified network. After logging into the portal from an uncertified location, users will be prompted to enter an additional password or code provided to them via sms messaging. If, users, are on the trusted network or trusted site, only one password is needed to access the portal.

Once logged into the community-wide provider portal, users are able to access authorized sites including, for example, real-time electronic transactions. Examples of real-time query transactions available through provider portals include payer claim inquiries, access to eligibility benefits and plan details, referral requests, provider inquiries, e-consent, provider demographic updates, and secure file transfer. These transactions reduce cost, streamline administrative processes, and reduce paper work. In fact, electronic transactions offer significant savings over traditional payer-provider communications. Milliman, an independent consulting firm, reports an estimated “per-transaction savings range from 50% to 90% depending on the complexity of the transaction when switching from manual to electronic transactions [resulting] in savings of over $42,000 per year” per physician practice.

Provider portals also allow providers to send messages to each other and view specific data, data which is consolidated or aggregated in the portal. Through portals, providers can get information from other sources and utilize expand-on-view data. In addition to HIEs, Accountable care organizations (ACOs) also benefit from provider portals because they provide a central location to access information and provide clinicians with a complete view of a patient’s current health in additional to offering enhanced and more efficient communication.

  There are many benefits accrued through the use of a provider portal, however, technology can also presents challenges. Implementing healthcare technology can be cumbersome and initially add workflow for employees, while single sign-on requires integration with other systems and can require employee training. Yet, these items are relatively insignificant in comparison to the many benefits of community-wide provider portal.

APP Design’s RHIOnet solution serves as a community-wide provider  portal. RHIOnet provides Two Factor Authentication (TFA) and connects to existing clinical applications and practice management systems. The single sign-on feature of RHIOnet enables users to connect seamlessly between clinical systems, HIEs, payers and third party services such as faxing or transcription reports for a streamlined approach to electronic data interchange. By using single sign-on to access services such as e-consent, disclosure tracking, eligibility and claims status, RHIOnet lowers costs and reduces administrative burden by lessening the burden placed on help desks, improving payment collections, reducing data entry errors and increasing workflow efficiency.

More and more hospital executives, physicians and nurses want to use their own mobile devices for work tasks such as checking e-mail and scheduling appointments, and clinicians are using them to communicate with one another about patients and to exchange data. A report titled “Special Report: Apps, Doctors and Digital Devices” by Jackson & Coker Research Associates found that four out of five practicing physicians use smartphones, computer tablets and apps for a wide variety of medical, technical and administrative tasks, while a 2012 survey by Aruba Networks, Inc. on healthcare mobility trends found that 85 percent of its 130 hospital respondents support the use of personal devices at work. In addition, in a survey recently published by Spyglass Consulting Group, approximately 69 percent of the hospitals interviewed had nursing staff using smartphones on the job that the facility’s IT department was not willing to support on the hospital’s network

BYOD offers healthcare organizations the option to reduce hardware costs while increasing employee satisfaction, but it also raises serious concerns about the security and privacy of sensitive organizational and patient data while increasing the associated liability. Healthcare organizations face a number of challenges in making sure their BYOD program complies with HIPAA security standards and other security protocols and industry regulations. Failure to meet these guidelines can result in hefty penalties, especially since President Obama signed into law a bill allowing the U.S. FDA to regulate mobile medical apps.

To avoid penalties, security breaches and other risks, it is integral that healthcare organizations develop a strict BYOD policy. Hospitals need to outline how mobile devices can be used on the job. A BYOD risk assessment can help healthcare organizations determine if employees are already using their personal mobile device for work tasks. It should be used to determine whether or not a BYOD program is a doable goal for their organization.

There are three general BYOD program models used in healthcare organizations, the first of which is strict, controlled access. Strict, controlled access allows healthcare professionals to use a mobile device only from a pre-approved list of devices owned by the healthcare organization, whereas partial, controlled access lets those workers use personal mobile devices with partial access to specific information. The third and least popular model, maximum access, minimal control, enables healthcare professionals to receive full access to most organizational data.

Depending on what type of BYOD program model is chosen, hospitals and other such organizations may want to outline the type of devices or platforms supported at their facilities and complete a comprehensive risk assessment. A BYOD risk assessment is designed to allow a healthcare organization to find out if employees are already using their personal mobile device for work tasks and can be used to determine whether or not a BYOD program is a doable goal for their organization.

Whatever BYOD program a healthcare organization chooses, it’s important to develop a strict policy that uses a collaborative approach to meet the organization’s main information security guidelines and to educate staff about the policy while taking into account staff satisfaction. Many healthcare professionals are already using their own mobile devices at work without giving security a second thought, and healthcare organizations without a BYOD policy in place are risking non-compliance with government regulations, less secure patient data and increased physician liability. Healthcare organizations need to adopt a mix of policy, software, infrastructure controls and educational initiatives in their BYOD program to ensure it is successful.

A survey of patients in the Atlanta VA Medical Center found that 96 percent of its patients surveyed preferred taking part in an e-consent process rather than its paper counterpart. The results of that survey reinforce the multimedia learning principal of Richard Mayer, one of the leading researchers in that area, that people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. According to Mayer in his book ‘The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning,’ the use of both words and pictures lets human brains process more information in working memory, and when related content is presented together in time and visually, learning is more effective. Adding audio and video components to presentations only further enhances this understanding.

The use of multimedia can stimulate more than one sense at a time, often making it more entertaining for users. It uses the natural information processing abilities humans already possess and increases the likelihood that information will effectively be integrated into long-term memory. Multimedia learning applications allow users to study interactively at their own pace and interact with a presentation for increased comprehension. This increased comprehension helps users retain and increase their learning because they are more fully engaged.

A prime example of multimedia learning is APP Design’s RHIOnet Educational Story Engine, which delivers complex multimedia content to large audiences in a simple and engaging manner. The solution’s educational application is built on its Story Engine platform, which is comprised of two components, the Story Builder and the Story Presenter. The Story Builder is used to build and organize customized content, and the Story Presenter is used to display it.

RHIOnet Educational Story Engine also includes Story Inspector, a tool that tracks several different statistical trails associated with any published creation, information which can be accessed from the author’s Story Builder home page. Statistics captured by Story Inspector include:

• Stories Presented: compiles total times story is started.
• Average View Time: compiles average time story is viewed by all users.
• Average Pages Viewed: compiles average number of pages viewed per story started.
• Stories Completed: compiles number of times story was fully viewed.
• Percent of Stories Completed – pie chart of stories completed vs. stories incomplete.
• Story Page Views – bar graph showing number of hits per page.
• Story Page – displays the pages of the story.
• Views – compiles the number of times the page was viewed.
• Average View Time – compiles the average time spent on each page.

Through the Story Builder solution, authors can create customized content-specific pages by adding text and uploading video and audio files, allowing them to organize each page to build their story. They also can decide the order of the content, what content users are required to view, what information is optional and more. To facilitate the ability of users to increase their comprehension of a topic through interactive multimedia, Story Builder enables authors to create their own instructional lessons and adapt content for any demographic or environment.

The Story Presenter tool of RHIOnet gives authors the capability to display their story to patients using a combination of text, video, audio or animation. This is especially important because it allows a user, or patient, to be actively engaged in the story by watching, reading and listening to the story, all at their own pace. In addition, Story Presenter helps users focus on specific topics and obtain more information on that topic for increased comprehension. Any changes or updates to an author’s story are immediately available to users since the stories are delivered over the Web.

Each of these tools lets necessary information be presented to the appropriate audience in a timely manner, which is especially important in e-consent. With the successful exchange of patient health information through an HIE relying on increased adoption of e-consent, it is necessary for solutions like Story Engine to encourage patients to actively participate in the sharing of their health information.

ACOs require a health information network that utilizes the sharing of best practices used for provider and payer information, and both public and private HIEs are reaching out to the ACOs the reduce costs and increase revenue. In addition, the regulations for the Medicare Shared Savings Program point to HIEs playing an important role in the ability of ACOs to achieve the performance and functionality necessary to meet government guidelines.

For ACOs to be successful, they should include instrumentality and serviceability of a full-feature, functioning HIE to allow for streamlined electronic communication and ensure that the HIE is flexible and customizable. ACOs should be paired with an HIE that provides them with a method to exchange healthcare data securely and privately to support continued care and operate in an efficient manner. Through the communication available between ACO patients and physicians through an HIE, those patients can better manage their personal health records for improved care and knowledge of preventative health measures. The seamless sharing of information can also help ACOs better coordinate care and reduce risks while curtailing healthcare costs.

It is necessary for the infrastructure of an HIE working with an ACO to be able to send and receive healthcare data with all included providers. It is also necessary for ACOs to have an HIE that utilizes solutions that are not limited by disparate systems, geographic issues and structural and organizational boundaries. By allowing for this interoperability, ACOs help promote HIE sustainability.

In a recent Becker’s Hospital Review article, Micky Tripathi, CEO and President of the the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), a national leader in the facilitation and management of electronic health record (EHR) deployment, health information exchange and quality measure reporting, provides the following list of five integral steps for ACOs to take when setting up an HIE:

1. Identify what information you want to share and with whom you want to share it. There may also be instances in which partners in an ACO or integrated system need to share more information with collaborators that are not officially partners. The inner circle of ACO participants should be able to share information to the highest degree within the constraints of the HIE’s capabilities.
2. Think seriously about HIE governance and organization. Since hospitals are funding and driving many ACOs, they may tend to assume the same infrastructure governance rules for the hospital’s individual information exchange will apply to an ACO’s. But a hospital’s internal record information sharing system and an ACO’s HIE are different, involving multiple organizations and information specific to the ACO. It is therefore crucial for members of an ACO to sit at the drawing board and map out a governance strategy. Hospitals need to decide if they are willing to take on the legal responsibility that comes with having greater access to records health and patient information.
3. Establish secure back-and-forth email information exchange between partners. A crucial step, HIPAA compliant email allows partners to share confidential information in a safer way and with more accountability than traditional faxes.
4. Provide the IT capability to identify records across an ACO. Once secure email exchange between members of the ACO is established, an accurate, current, and complete master patient index including demographic and medical data on patients is necessary. Having patient data on hand means having the right information at the right time leading to greater quality of care.
5. Create a full-fledged query system that operates outside the episode of care. The final, most advanced level of an HIE allows a complete picture of a patient no matter that person’s ability to provide their medical information. For example, a patient shows up in an emergency department unable to provide any personal medical information, “but clinicians — assuming they have managed to somehow identify the name of the patient — will have the ability to query the HIE and get a high level of medical information about the patient in a seamless, automated way”.

In addition to the documentation requirements brought on by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), legal, payer and regulatory requirements have increased the number of documents healthcare organizations must handle for patient visits. As we mentioned in our previous blog outlining the benefits of automating administrative transactions through a health information exchange (HIE), paperwork and other types of documentation make up one- third of most physicians’ daily workflow. Doctors typically spend 12 cents of every dollar they receive from patients to cover administrative costs, and, again, many residents spend up to twice as much on documentation as their counterparts did two decades earlier.

In addition to the time spent on documentation, physicians who manually and through a paper system perform tasks such as insurance administration experience higher costs than those who do such administrative tasks electronically. This documentation can include administrative forms, correspondence from health plans, reports on home care and physical therapy and more. With this documentation battle, physicians must make clinical decisions with less time to investigate a patient’s symptoms and less information obtained from speaking with a patient.

A significant part of physicians’ paperwork is due to dealing with health plans. A survey of U.S. physicians and practice administrators completed by Health Affairs found that physicians in the United States spend almost ten times more interacting with health plans than their Ontario counterparts spend on interactions with Canada’s single-payer plan. The main difference is that that non-physician staff members in the United States spend larger amounts of time on billing and obtaining prior authorizations than their Canadian counterparts.

One way to make sure that physicians and nurses are spending their time on their patients rather than paperwork is to simplify the administrative process and to require that health care providers use a single standardized administrative format. The use of administrative and clinical transactions allows for a more efficient workflow.

Performing administrative transactions through an HIE can help to improve the quality of health care by freeing up resources now devoted to paperwork and administration. While paper-oriented systems are slow and prone to errors and add significant cost, and waste, HIEs can save money through improved efficiencies in management of health care services by reducing the administrative paperwork and errors between providers and payers. Also, by utilizing administrative transactions in an HIE, physicians can have access to more patient data upfront, allowing them to spend more time with their patients. Having access to such patient data can also enable physicians to make more precise diagnoses and manage treatments for chronic diseases.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) took the first steps to implement an Affordable Care Act provision that cuts red tape in the health care system and saves an estimated $12 billion over the next ten years. These savings come from improved use of electronic standards that will help eliminate inefficient manual processes and reduce costs, and it is estimated that these changes will save the U.S. healthcare system $12 billion over the next 10 years.

By making it easier for physicians and hospitals to access patient insurance data before or at the point of care, the operating rules of core can enhance interoperability between providers and payers, streamline eligibility, benefits and claim data transactions and reduce the amount of time providers spend on performing administrative transactions, allowing for more face to face time with patients. The enhanced interoperability can benefit the healthcare industry by reducing costs for stakeholders dealing with the exchange of healthcare data while improving the usefulness of such data.

CAQH’s CORE was chosen by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the authoring body for the first set of operating rules mandated by the Federal government for eligibility and claim status transactions. Federal law requires all healthcare organizations covered by HIPAA to adopt the Phase I & II CAQH CORE Eligibility & Claim Status Operating Rules by January 1, 2013. According to mandates from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), all providers, health plans and healthcare clearinghouses must comply with the operating rules by the deadline or accrue significant penalties. Health plans must also certify by that deadline that they are able to support each of the standards and operating rules on the date of each certification. December 31, 2013 is the certification date by which health plans are required to, according to CAQH, “file a statement with HHS certifying that their data and information systems are in compliance with the standards and operating rules.”

APP Design has begun development of CORE Phase II connectivity for the administrative transaction network of New York HIE. Each payer involved with the HIE will have its own URL for CORE connectivity. The URL will link to a portal with CORE Phase II application programming interface (API) on the front end and existing payer connectivity on the back end. The payer portals and the HIE’s administrative transaction network will split eligibility batches and send transactions to existing payer connections, while APP Design maintains the application, provides updates and fixes any bugs.

The connectivity developed by APP Design leverages the HIE’s existing connectivity. There is no reference API implementation cost for payers involved in the HIE, and payers do not have to implement updates or fix any bugs. In addition, because there is less software development required by APP Design, the overall cost of the project is lower.

Future deadlines of CORE include January 1, 2014, the ACA deadline for the effective date of implementation of national operating rules for electronic funds transfer (EFT) and remittance advice (ERA) transactions and also the ACA deadline for the effective date of using the EFT standards ACA to transmit electronic healthcare claim payments through the ACH Network. July 1, 2014 is the ACA deadline for the adoption of national operating rules for enrollment, referral authorization and attachments, and January 1, 2016 is the ACA deadline for the effective date of implementation of national operating rules for enrollment, referral authorization and attachments.

Physicians use tablet computers in professional settings in a variety of ways. From accessing drug and treatment reference to obtaining new information about treatments and research and accessing patient records and data, they allow doctors to perform a variety of tasks quickly and efficiently. Some physicians use tablets to place and upload orders for laboratory work, and others event use them to make decisions on patient treatment and diagnosis.

Clinicians enjoy increased mobility and accessibility through the use of tablet computers, especially because the devices ensure that the most up-to-date information is at a clinician’s fingertips throughout the care delivery process. Tablets provide clinicians with user-friendly, mobile access to electronic records, even when at the point of service. Also, by providing real-time tracking of patient information, tablet computers offer increased productivity, thereby enhanced patient satisfaction. Similarly, radiologist enjoy that tablets give them access to medical images from anywhere, even allowing for bedside viewing of radiology studies.

Following are 8 reasons to use tablets in healthcare industry:

1. Mobility – Tablet computers allow physicians and other healthcare professionals to look up patient information from anywhere, and the devices’ portability makes it also easier to take the information to the patient instead of the patient to the information.
2. Convenience – Tablets allow healthcare workers to capture activities as they happen, eliminating the need to remember and document activities after they happen. The devices are also convenient for the healthcare setting because they are lightweight, have a long battery life and utilize easy-to-use touch screens.
3. Automation – Through the automation of key forms, processes and workflows on a tablet computer, the devices can help physicians and clinicians collect and transmit patient data to meet meaningful use guidelines and improve patient care.
4. Reduced costs – The use of tablets in healthcare offers better access to patient information, thereby resulting in a reduction of diagnostic and treatment errors and saving money for healthcare facilities. The devices also ensure that all billable charges are captured in real-time.
5. Rapid innovation – There is an increasing number of applications for healthcare professionals to use on tablet computers, allowing those professionals to look up drug interactions, view ICD-10 codes, check out medical images and connect to voice dictation software.
6. User-friendliness – Tablet computers offer easy-to-learn applications that fit into the workflow of various healthcare workers.
7. New tablet-specific software – Healthcare technology vendors are beginning to design software specifically for tablet computers, software that is customized for the healthcare industry.
8. Video communication – Many physicians use tablets to view video that helps them learn and keep up-to-date with clinical information. Video communication through tablets also can be used in telemedicine.

Tablets bring up-to-the-minute patient information to the point of care and provide healthcare professionals with real-time access to data.

To combat this issue, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed through its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for Stage 2 Meaningful Use that mobile devices, including tablet computers, which retain patient data after a clinical encounter should have default encryption enabled. According to the HHS, the move is an attempt to eliminate the potential for patient data breaches on mobile devices.

Though precautionary measures are available to improve the security of tablet computers and other mobile devices used by healthcare professionals, healthcare organizations need to track what data is included on a device in case it is lost and check to make sure that the appropriate tools are being used. In addition, documentation of such measures should be completed so that healthcare organizations are in line with all corresponding compliance and audit guidelines.

A major component of security in the use of tablet computers in healthcare is making sure employees are educated on the steps to ensure patient privacy and made aware of what they can do to help protect patient data. Additional recommended security measures for healthcare professionals who use tablet computers in a healthcare setting are listed below.

One such measure, encryption, is a security feature which prevents unauthorized users from reading data stored on a tablet. As a preferred method of data protection by the HHS, encryption can prevent those who have possession of a lost or stolen tablet from accessing any sensitive data by using certain keys that can be unlocked using methods such as passwords. In some cases, third party e-mail only encryption solutions can be used to support tablets that cannot enable full device encryption.

Next, a remote wipe of a tablet computer allows a user to prevent access to patient data by deleting such data if a device is lost or stolen. This remote action can either erase all data automatically or after a defined number of unsuccessful log-in attempts. The downside to remote data wipes is that they may remove non-patient data if that data is not correctly backed up.

A third security measure for tablet computers used by healthcare professionals is remote data storage. This method uses applications that store data on a network and allow remote access through a secure connection. Similarly, remote desktop access enables users to store patient data on a desktop while viewing and controlling that data remotely through a tablet.

The disabling of certain features on a tablet computer may also help a healthcare organization increase the security of its devices. By disabling features that more easily leak patient data, such as USB ports, microphones and cameras, healthcare organizations are able to block certain information from being accessed by an unauthorized user. Some healthcare organizations use perimeter settings to disable ports once a tablet leaves a specific perimeter.

Even implementing strong password controls offers protection against the unauthorized dissemination of patient data from tablet computers used by healthcare professionals. These controls include access to a password history that may prevent the repeated use of prior passwords, require passwords to be set periodically and enact a required login to applications which carry patient data. Some tablet computers used by healthcare professionals employ biometric authentication to prevent unauthorized access to patient data.

Each of these security measures provides additional layers of security to tablet computers used by healthcare professionals. It is also important for healthcare organizations to periodically perform an inventory of tablets and other mobile devices that store patient data. Following these measures helps increase security of patient data without disrupting the workflow of healthcare professionals.