Welcome to Health 2.0, where software and mobile tools are being used to enhance collaboration between medical providers and their patients and more easily disseminate patient information too. In this new era of mobile health information and reporting, anyone with access to a mobile device or the web can gather important patient data in moments, or even instantly. The business world has had this sort of access for a while now, so it was only natural for the medical industry to follow suit. And with President Barack Obama’s recent signing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, or the Hitech Act, which offers up to $27 billion in incentives for medical facilities to switch over to digital records for patient information, it only proves the medical world is moving in this direction.

One drastic measure taken to increase access to health information is medical text messaging. Through secure instant messaging and secure text capabilities, health care providers can directly communicate with their patients over the phone, and providers can just as easily grab information on a patient directly from their mobile devices, thereby taking better advantage of a system intended to make things go more simply. HIPAA texting in particular has paved the way for a new era in which everyone within a medical facility can communicate with one another and with their patients more easily.

With HIPAA texting, safe and secure texts are sent by all parties, and all information is extremely encrypted and protected. Of course, HIPAA texting is done only through the most proper channels, which in this case are providers that offer a HIPAA texting service. Because compliance issues are at play, more must be done than just simply sending along a text. It has to be among the most protected mobile healthcare applications since private patient data is almost always part of the text. Because this is so, medical facilities must secure the devices their employees use, including tablet computers and smartphones, to ensure HIPAA compliance.

When choosing a HIPAA texting provider, companies have to understand not only the main offerings surrounding the service but the backup, emergency access, archiving, and security needs too. They also must evaluate their own HIPAA compliance policy to ensure a text messaging service they select will work within those parameters. HIPAA texting is extremely useful when used in the most stable and well functioning environments.
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