Letter From Our CTO: Telehealth Transformation Requires Patient Data Protection

In recent years, we’ve seen an increased demand for transformative care like remote patient monitoring (RPM) and telehealth nurse triage. Conversely, we’ve also seen an increase in data hijacking, ransomware, and other digital threats to our industry that have forced organizations to increase their investment in technology to protect patient data. As a service provider, we believe that it is our job to establish the proper infrastructure for patient data protection for the calls that we manage. Here are some of our latest measures to ensure security with our clients.

SOC 2 Certification

TriageLogic is now in the process of acquiring SOC 2 certification. SOC 2 is an audit to ensure the security of cloud-based patient data, and comes in two stages: 

• The first serves as a snapshot in time (Type 1).
• The second takes place after six months or longer (Type 2).

The criteria that is used to perform these audits revolves around the five (5) trust service principles of privacy, confidentiality, processing integrity, availability, and security.

Some sample requirements to be certified successfully as Type 2 include: 

• Hosting data in HIPAA-compliant data centers.
• Scheduling regular vulnerability scans of applications and servers.
• Performing manual penetration testing to evaluate weaknesses a hacker can exploit.
• Implementing the proper intrusion detection software that monitors data traffic 24/7. 
• Requiring multi-factor authentication for all user logins.
• Establishing a proper user audit process and access control policies.

SOC 2 isn’t simply a nice-to-have feature in data security. Because ransomware attacks have doubled in the last two years, it’s now an essential component for patient data protection and management. That’s why we’ve been working diligently to complete this process, while continuing to offer our healthcare providers the most secure, HIPAA-compliant nurse triage services on the market today. Those include documenting all triage calls thoroughly, recording all interactions between patients and their respective nurses, using updated nurse triage protocols to establish appropriate dispositions for care, and making this data compatible for integration with any provider’s existing EMR. 

Secure Texting

It wasn’t so long ago that the primary means for nurses to contact doctors required paging them with callback numbers. But this carried the risk of delaying care if doctors didn’t successfully receive their pages, or if they weren’t aware of the urgency of these requests.

That’s why nurse-doctor chat options are now relatively prevalent. The only problem is that most of these require users to download and register an app. When care is episodic in a call center environment like ours, this can be a challenge. Plus, most of these apps are third-party software that won’t record conversations between call center nurses and patients.

That’s why TriageLogic developed its own app-free secure texting module that doesn’t require any downloads or registration. It can be activated immediately, functions off of browser encryption, and can be used on any mobile device. Nurses send notifications to doctors in the form of links that those doctors must click and acknowledge before they gain access to patient data. This consolidates the information a doctor needs to review, gives them the ability to respond immediately, and conveys any level of urgency based on patients’ symptoms. 

All data and conversations are stored securely for continuity of care, reference, and accountability.

Your Patient Data Protection

Are you looking for ways to improve the security of your own patient data? We’d be happy to share other tips about physical and digital security, as well as discuss the triage services we offer that incorporate them. Contact us today to learn more about SOC 2, secure texting, and other forms of patient data protection that can improve health outcomes.