Remember when voicemail was the primary method for patients to communicate with healthcare providers? If the staff at a physician’s office was extremely busy, the patient would leave a message detailing his or her request for the practice.
With the rapid adoption of two-way text messaging, email and other forms of electronic communication, though, many have seen voicemail as a ubiquitous communication tool. Some doctor’s office staff see it as a cumbersome burden requiring too much hassle to set up greetings, keep mailboxes empty, check incoming messages and update outgoing ones.
Many physician practices now utilize digital technology known as Voice Over IP (VoIP) phones, which enhance their strategy for connecting with patients, especially after office hours. This technology allows practice staff to prioritize calls and communicate more efficiently to avoid losing calls and revenue from patient leakage.
In addition to providing 24/7 availability for patients and providers, voicemail improves the accuracy of message content, offers multiple features and saves patients time. A vital component of a physician practice’s communication strategy, it adds another level of convenience, especially for the growing trend of healthcare consumerism. It is an expedient method for prescription renewals, appointment reminders and other often burdensome administrative tasks.
How HIPAA Applies to Voicemail
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule is peppered with rules and regulations to protect sensitive patient health information (PHI) from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. For patient outreach, it doesn’t prohibit covered entities from communicating with patients using voicemail. However, providers should limit the amount of information disclosed on these calls and not leave information on any lab result that necessitates a patient take immediate follow-up action.
Healthcare providers that employ voicemail for patients to communicate with them should include the following elements of a professional voicemail greeting:
- Information: Your voicemail should provide all the information the caller needs. At the very least, the recording should include your name, the name of your practice, and your office hours. You can also include the best way to reach you and provide that contact information.
- Validation: A professional voicemail greeting should thank the caller for their call and apologize for missing it. If you can’t do both, at least show gratitude or regret.
- Motivation: A professional voicemail aims to keep the caller on the line long enough to listen to your message. You do that by motivating them enough to listen and leave their message. For this to happen, your recording must make them wait for their speech.
- Length: Keep your voicemail greetings within ten and 30 seconds. Many people will appreciate a short, concise message that immediately gives them all the necessary information.
The Design of the RingRx Platform
RingRx was created to end the persistent problems with communication in healthcare phone systems by developing easy-to-use tools that help providers improve patient care while reducing costs and errors. Voicemail is a staple of contemporary hosted communications and the repository for most PHI, so we ensured it was a core component of our platform.
For our innovative communications platform, we made sure to include multiple requirements, including:
- Security and redundancy: HIPAA voicemail must be completely encrypted and stored in multiple geographies simultaneously to eliminate any single points of failure. In the era of cloud services, availability is king.
- Auditing: Messages are PHI, so we must show who touched them and when.
- Collaboration: The ability to listen to, read and annotate messages in shared mailboxes helps to avoid duplicated efforts and improve efficiency.
- Many to one: Medical practices often have numerous general mailboxes in addition to users’ personal message stores. This arrangement is complicated because it can lead to one user managing many mailboxes, each for different purposes.
- Transcription: Transcription used to be premium, but these days, if you aren’t transcribing HIPAA voicemail, you aren’t keeping up. Employees and employers see that reading messages is a force multiplier. It saves time and makes messages easier to share with co-workers.
- More than voicemail: Users want to keep secure archives of multiple types of messages, such as SMS, faxes and any piece of information that transited the system.
- Extensibility: We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, so we designed a system to easily extend new data and workflows as our customers’ needs evolved.
Along with these requirements, we designed and built our first-in-the-industry PHIlo (PHI Silo) storage layer for our platform on top of Apache CouchDB and other open-source technologies chosen for loosely-coupled clustering, eventual consistency and web scale. The RingRx system allows layers to be anywhere—fully distributed—about each other, giving us complete workflow control.
Because our solution demands encryption at every single layer, we wrapped every component in best-of-breed encryption utilizing bi-direction authentication. Fully orchestrated and designed to be automatically scaled up or down on a second’s notice, the RingRx Voicemail system operates with minimal human hands to minimize security exposure, thereby solving the issue of capacity management.
Through our superior, all-encompassing voicemail platform, we can provide healthcare provider organizations of all sizes and types with 100 percent HIPAA-compliant VoIP healthcare phone systems that protect confidential health information and improve patient communication. Please take advantage of our free, 14-day trial to learn how to simplify communication between your practice and your patients cost-effectively. Also, check out our Tips for Designing a HIPAA-compliant Phone System.
