Secure File Transfer for Healthcare

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is in full force today, and all healthcare providers (doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics), health plans (HMOs, insurers), and trading partners must comply with this federal law designed to safeguard protected health information (PHI).

The transfer of PHI, including X-rays, lab results, notes, prescriptions, and other protected information, to another hospital, physician, insurance group, or other entity that must comply with HIPAA, is a mission critical and highly sensitive operation. Many healthcare workers still use email or FTP to send PHI today. These methods lack the security, tracking, and auditing needs to ensure PHI is properly protected.

Customer Success Story

Partners Healthcare is comprised of 18 hospitals and health centers, including Massachusetts General Hospital, and needed to generate and send reports to their more than 2000 affiliated physician groups that refer patients the hospital network. In addition to maintaining the document integrity and security, full end to end tracking – including delivery receipt – was required. With thousands of physicians requiring reports, securing messages through key-encrypted email would mean a massive effort for training end users and maintaining the system. This system would still not provide confirmation that a message was viewed or even received.

Biscom Delivery Server provided a simple solution for Partners Healthcare needs. Reports generated by the in-house application are passed to the Biscom Delivery Server using the Web services API. BDS delivers a message notification to the physicians via email with an embedded URL. Recipients provide authentication credentials to sign in and retrieve the message and any attached documents. All accesses to the message and documents are recorded in BDS and passed back to the originating application through the API. Biscom Delivery Server allows referral reports to be sent to physicians outside the network securely with a full audit trail including confirmation of delivery.