The Solaris Hospice is one of the main palliative care centers in the Southwest – working from 16 locations to provide care and support for more than 400 patients every day. The hospice’s workforce of 150 physicians and nurses work in a vast rural area in which effective communication is vital in order to maintain the organization’s reputation as a healthcare leader among the regions it serves.
One of the biggest hurdles experienced by the organization was maintaining the integrity of its client´s protected healthcare information (PHI) while its workforce was spread throughout the community. Following the enactment of new regulations within the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), all PHI now has to be encrypted and monitored when it is statonary or in transit.
The new regulations mean that “traditional” methods of broadcasting patient data – such as SMS and email – are effectively illegal, and this created a problem for community nurses who wanted to escalate patient concerns to the organization´s medical team or send pictures of their patients´ conditions. Now the issue has been virtually eliminated due to the intorudction of a secure messaging system from TigerText.
Secure messaging allows community nurses and physicians at the Solaris Hospice to swap confidential information securely within a private network by the use of secure messaging apps. Secure messaging apps work across all operating systems and have an interface that is very like SMS messaging – so staff at the hospice had no issue embracing them and have started using the apps to improve healthcare-related communications, share images and collaborate work in relation to treating patients.
Already employees at the Solaris Hospice are sending up to 40,000 secure messages a month and Andy Milligan -Solaris´ CEO – believes that by allowing administrators, physicians and community nurses to connect more effectively, response times at the Solaris Hospital have improved majorly. He stated: “TigerText provides us with an integrated system for securely streamlining our day-to-day conversations, freeing up more of our staff’s time to focus on patient care”.
Secure communication is guaranteed, and made easy with the addition of an easy-to-use, secure messaging app. The interface is familiar, the controls are use friendly and little time has been spent having to learning a new system.
“We needed a more consistent and HIPAA compliant way to communicate patient information in a timely manner,” Andy Milligan addedd, “We’ve even incorporated TigerText into our communication policy as it allows us to send patient information safely and securely, enabling us to move away from slower and non-compliant channels such as voice and email.”
