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American Medicine

The ease of using email communications is increasing the efficiency of many businesses, and our social lives as well. Many patients are emailing their physicians and the doctors are sending back answers.

But new regulations implementing 2 of our laws, HIPAA and HITECH privacy statutes, have now been finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services in January 2013.

These new rules indicate that it is a violation of the law for a physician to send any protected health information to patients (this includes test results, diagnoses, and health recommendations) without encryption of the information to keep it private. It’s ok for patients to ask any questions, if they want, but illegal for doctors to respond in any method that is not secure (important: phone call, letter, and fax are all considered secure).

So it is important for your doctor to have a secure messaging system if you want to communicate electronically with the office.

Here are my tips:

• Ask your doctor’s office staff if they have a secure messaging system
• Learn how to use it
• If no system is in place, see if you can duplicate a system by using fax services that are exempt from these rules, and are more secure than email.
• When you are picking a doctor, ask offices that you are considering if they have secure messaging, since many practices do have these.

For more tips see Chapter 7 Communicating with Your Doctor in my book Surviving American Medicine available at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and iUniverse.com.