Using this new technology as a means for marketing your company can be very rewarding.  However; there come inherent privacy risks that face the healthcare industry that will need to be continuously addressed with your staff as you delve into the world of social media.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times entitled When Facebook goes to the hospital, patients may suffer by Molly Hennessy-Fiske the author describes an example in which hospital employees took pictures of a dying ER patient and posted them to a Facebook account.  As you can imagine this sent quite a stir through the hospital and privacy organizations as HIPAA policy and patient security are of the utmost importance.  The incident was a violation of HIPAA regulations and lapse in common sense, and it resulted in the termination of 4 employees involved.

Although the incident itself is over we, as medical professionals, now have to consider if it is secure for us to use social media to market our companies, and how to protect ourselves and our patients from privacy violations in the future.

Is using social media to market your practice, hospital, or healthcare related business worth the risk and if so what can be done to minimize any risk involved.

Please leave your suggestions and comments below.  I would really like to hear your opinion before I post my methods for secure use of social media in the healthcare industry.

This article was inspired by a tweet from @PrivacyProf on Twitter referencing a recent article in the LA Times. Be sure to follow her if you are in healthcare and using social media to connect with patients and other professionals in the field.

We are excited to announce a new web based reporting system for our clients!

This system will be a library of the monthly practice report(s) that we provide to you for your practice. This is a secure system that will provide you and any other person(s) you authorize, access to your practice information. Your practice report will be in an Adobe PDF format and a link will be provided to download a free copy of Adobe Reader if the user does not have a copy.

The system was develop to:

• Speed the distribution of practice data to you.
• Securely distribute data to all authorized person(s).
• Allow you to access historical data on your practice without having to store it at home, the office, etc.
• Eliminate printing and mailing cost.

The buzz is about government incentives, increased patient care, and reduced cost.

Sounds great doesn’t it? But what is the cost? What qualifies you for the incentives, and how are you going to maintain this new system? For that matter what is EMR?

What are EMR and EHR?

EMR & EHR are abbreviations for the terms electronic medical records and electronic health records.

An electronic health record is basically a digital version of a traditional patient’s file. You know the file that is kept in a physician’s office or on the foot a hospital bed while a patient is being treated. This digital record is part of a greater system known as electronic medical records.

The electronic medical records system helps reduce the necessity of a local paper based copy of a patient’s file. How? Well the idea is that it will allow the information to be saved digitally on a server making access to patient information fast and secure using computers and other electronic devices such as tablet computers, cellular telephones, and PDAs.

This information can be accessed by all of the patient’s physicians allowing for better data flow and increased patient care from wherever the physician is located. A universal patient record could reduce the need for preliminary tests that have already been performed and increase the integrity of the data about a chronic illness a patient might be suffering from.

In my opinion EHRs are a technology that will benefit patients and physicians in a huge way.

What Are The Pros of EMR?

Increase patient care: Yes, imagine a world where a patient’s information can be accessed on the go, where you don’t have to wait for a document to be pulled, and don’t have to hope the notes are legible. That is a world with full support and participation in an EMR program. If you have a trained employee and a sound system you can have just that. An EHR can deliver more info faster which will absolutely improve every patient’s every visit.

Reduced cost: If done right in the long run you can save money with EMR. You remove the cost of printing, filing, and storing paper data. You can reduce staff. And retrieve information quicker. You can accomplish more inside and outside of your office because you have greater access to your patient information.

What Are The Cons of EMR?

Now to contradict my previous statement.The initial cost is high and can remain high if the system isn’t used properly. If you are a physician and you are considering implementing an EMR system I am sure you have run into your first wall. The cost. To purchase the software, lease the hardware, to pay for the hosting fees, and training of an EMR system can cost your practices thousands into hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the size of your practice. You have to pay for security, for licenses for software, for redundancy*, and for the devices to communicate with the system.

You have to have a great internet connection or two. Assuming as a physician you aren’t completely familiar with maintaining an in house network and servers you are going to be hosting your system outside of your office. You are going to be connecting to it via the internet. Now with that cost you met before you paid to make sure your servers are always up and running, but the same precaution needs to be taken with your internet provider. Because if your internet goes down you lose all access to your patient information and that could stop your practice in it’s tracks.

And finally training training training. Without ongoing training of how to use the system correctly your office will be running ineffectively costing you more than what you are benefiting. Implementing an EMR system is going to take a lot of time and effort from both the physician and his/her staff members. If the legwork isn’t put in up front the system will likely be detrimental rather than beneficial.

So with our background of EMR done what’s the buzz? Tell me whats-a-happening.

What are these government incentives for EMR?

The US Government has been proactively involved in pushing new technology from the dawn of the Internet through military research to what is now the EHR. So it comes with no surprise to me that they are willing to pass up to $40,000 in incentives out to providers that are willing to implement the new electronic medical record technology.

But don’t be fooled by it and rush into anything. The government is giving the incentives out over a period of years to providers that demonstrate “meaningful use” of digital records. A generic term for which they haven’t even defined. So before you dive head first into uncharted waters with your practice be sure to do as much research into what the government defines as “meaningful use” so that you don’t end up lost at sea with empty pockets.

* Redundancy is a system design that duplicates components to provide alternatives in case one component fails