HIPAA Compliant Medical Document Scanning Services in the U.S The HIPAA act was essentially passed so as to ensure full security to the healthcare data of patients. Entities handling sensitive PHI have to implement foolproof security measures to prevent any kind of data leak. Scanning paper documents and storing them in digital format has become a common practice in healthcare centers and hospitals. This enables easy access to the required files from any location and also sharing among various people involved in providing healthcare services. Physicians find it easy to search and find the records of specific patients when they are in digital format. Performing the scanning jobs inhouse can be expensive and time consuming and so, it is best to outsource these tasks. HIPAA compliant medical document scanning services provided by reputable BPO firms in the US are thus a great support to healthcare providers. Finding Reliable Document Scanning Solutions Given that HIPAA compliance is an absolute necessity, your prime consideration as a healthcare provider should be to find suitable document scanning solutions. How to go about it? Here is a helpful checklist.
Ensure that the outsourcing company has provided training to all members of its workforce regarding HIPAA.
The document scanning company should ensure that the records are secured at all times, right from the time they are sent from your facility en-route to the scanning facility.
Only trained personnel should receive, index and scan the records.
Access to the scanning facility must be restricted to authorized employees.
Security measures should be in place to securely transfer the digitally scanned information back to your healthcare facility.
In case you need to store the paper documents, make sure that the outsourcing company can store them in a secured facility that is specially designed to protect the sensitive healthcare data.
Ideally, your outsourcing partner should not use home-based workers to ensure that no patient information leaves their office.
The staff should not be allowed to bring electronic devices including laptops and PDS, floppies or paper/written documents.
The workstations should be secure, and they should update firewalls and antivirus software on their systems regularly.
They should make periodic backup of data to prevent data loss.
They should have smoke alarms and fire extinguishers in place to face any contingent situation.
Spoiled hard copies of notes and patient records should be shredded on site.
24/7 security personnel to ensure maximum security.
Other Features to Look for in Your U.S. Document Scanning Company Once you are sure that the company you plan to outsource to is HIPAA compliant, you can also check for the following features.
See to it that the company has relevant past experience in providing medical document scanning service.
The staff present in the company should be experts in their own field. They should be able to scan all kinds of medical reports and give the necessary output.
The pricing should be reasonable and affordable.
They should provide good customer service.
The document scanning company should be able to meet your specific turnaround time requirements.