Providing telehealth services can be a worthy compliment to your practice; however, caution should be exercised before entering into a contractual relationship with a telehealth company. Keep in mind, when a telehealth company touts itself as “HIPAA compliant,” this is only one area where it must maintain compliance. It, along with the telehealth contract, must also be complaint with federal and/or state laws for furnishing telehealth services.
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By: Frank Diaz, Guest Contributor
Floridians are all too familiar with the business and logistical hurdles bad tropical weather can create. However, even less expected are the everyday human errors such as an overzealous backhoe operator digging above a fiber optic cable and inadvertently cutting a data connection. The reality is that disruption can happen anytime, not just during hurricane season. The good news is that recent developments in technology provide a new way to both augment the practice of medicine and insulate a business against downtime. Telemedicine or telehealth is rapidly becoming an inexpensive and secure way to interact with patients and medical professionals just short of the tactile response from pressing flesh during an introductory handshake.
Granted, telemedicine and telehealth are generic terms that incorporate layers of many technologies. For simplicity’s sake we’ll discuss some of the most popular options for video conferencing, cloud based technology and virtualization. If that sounds intimidating just look past the buzzwords you may hear in commercials mentioning a certain character from a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel. It’s all elementary. See what I did there?
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