Faxing errors by an Oregon healthcare provider threatens organization’s HIPAA Compliance efforts. According to CBS’ local affiliate in Eugene, Oregon, a Eugene resident received two patients’ confidential medical records in the past week. Unfortunately, this is not the first time the provider has made this mistake. The man charges that he has received many patient records at his home over the past decade.
Exposing a patient’s medical records to the public, or to any unintended viewers, is a major breach of patient privacy and of HIPAA compliance. Unfortunately, fax security risks continue to plague nearly all providers, insurers, and other firms that still communicate via paper fax. Healthcare organizations and professionals are devoting large amounts of time and resources to HIPAA compliance in the wake of large-scale healthcare reform. Do not let document and PHI exchange threaten your organization’s efforts to remain compliant and in the good graces of HIPAA auditors!
The RightFax fax server is the healthcare industry’s go-to fax solution for HIPAA-compliant document and PHI exchange. Faxing remains a critical part of healthcare workflow and faxing best practices must be set and followed for healthcare organizations to maintain HIPAA compliance. RightFax provides simple out-of-the-box functionalities that would have helped to prevent the document exchange issues that plagued the Oregon provider. One such feature is the RightFax public address book which allows users to add frequent contacts for prompt and accurate fax addressing. With this feature, healthcare providers can rest assured that their fax transmissions are being received by the correct institution. From inherently secure PSTN transmission to encrypted FoIP protocols to local file protection, RightFax supports the security and privacy safeguards every health care organization needs.