Legal Requirements to be Met by Answering Services for Medical Offices

Posted by Andy Gross on April 25th, 2018

A competent medical answering service provider does not merely boast about its integrity, experience, professionalism, and well-trained team. It also boasts a stringent legal compliance.

When you aim to choose an answering service provider for your medical office, look beyond the ambit of common aspects of trustworthiness, experience, client portfolio, specialization, etc. In the context of medical answering services, it becomes crucial to perceive whether the legal requirements have been met by answering service provider or not. Here are few aspects that will allow you to gain insights related to the same:

HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Compliant:
There lies a huge difference between opting for an ordinary medical Answering service provider and the one that ensures necessary HIPAA compliance. If you turn a blind eye towards this compliance, initially you may be able to trim down your service cost. However, this tendency may invite a serious trouble in future as the medical industry is extremely tricky. The aim to bring this act into existence is to handle the sensitive health information not only by the relevant industry but by all allied services contributors as well.

Accurate ePHI (Electronic Protected Health Information) Handling:
An accurate ePHI handling is an extremely crucial aspect of the entire HIPAA compliance. There came an update related to HIPAA in the year 2013. It stated that every service provider related to the healthcare industry should abide by security and privacy rules. In simple words, when a call center or an answering service provider will take the messages, they will have to be protected in a manner as if they are stored and distributed by the medical organization itself.

In this entire process, the manner in which these messages were stored, including a mobile device, PC, or a desktop, doesn’t really matter. Therefore, when you aim to get answering services for medical offices, do not forget to ensure that the selected service provider is competent in handling ePHI precisely.

All Relevant Safeguards Should Be in Place:
Whenever you want to get answering services for medical offices, do not forget to take a sneak peek at the appropriate placement of all the applicable safeguards. The HIPAA Journal has issued a practical checklist related to the HIPAA compliance. Under this, it has clearly specified the required safeguards to ensure a compliance with the act. Encryption of data in transition and an authentication process to check whether ePHI has been tweaked in any manner are two of its major safeguards.

In addition, a possibility of prohibited access to information that was meant only for specific users possessing PIN code and password is also assessed. In case of a terminal or device inactivity, automatic system logoff is also specified. There is one more compliance safeguard called ‘Message Lifespan Feature’. It restricts the time duration of a message on an electronic device of a service provider so that information cannot be accessed by any unauthorized user.

To sum up, for a Medical office service provider, it takes a lot in terms of meeting legal requirements. Placement of contingency plans is an effective sign of hiring an efficient medical office answering service provider.

If you are looking for Answering Services For Small Business, the author of this article suggests Sunshine Communications Inc.