Telephone answering systems are a huge part of any medical practice. They help keep things running smoothly and allow for easy communication between your practice and your patients. For a long time, everything was analog and messages were being stored on tape, but now many of us are going all digital with Voice Over IP (VoIP) phones.
While digital systems make life easier, letting members of your practice make and receive calls from anywhere and get voicemails transcriptions, it also adds a wrinkle for your security measures to cover. With electronic voicemail and transcriptions services, any voicemails that contain patient information are considered electronic protected health information (ePHI) and must be closely guarded to remain HIPAA compliant.
A VoIP telephone system has two components: making/receiving phone calls and storing voicemails. HIPAA regulations already cover phone calls regardless if they’re analog or digital, but since VoIP voicemails are stored on servers transcribed into text, they must be protected in the same way that emails and other digital forms of communication are. Digital information can be easy to access by those that know how, so extra precautions must be taken to keep them safe.
At Digifone, we offer a HIPAA-compliant VoIP system with encrypted transcription and email delivery services. When members of your practice receive a message containing ePHI, they must access it through a secure encryption service before they can view its content. The end-to-end encryption keeps the patient’s ePHI confidential and only available to members of your practice.
The benefits of Digifone VoIP systems don’t end at encryption services. Digifone allows you to use a traditional analog phone, a digital VoIP phone, or your computer or smart phone to make and receive phone calls all from the same phone number, and since VoIP works over your internet connection, you no longer need to pay for separate landline phone service. You can also connect remote offices and team members to the central system so it’s all run through the same phone number.
With over 30 years of IT and networking experience, the experts at Digifone would be happy to help you transition to a better, safer and more efficient telephone system. To see how Digifone will work best for you or your office, contact us online or call us at (614) 635-9676.