Doctors and nurses have a tremendous need for rich and real-time communication and collaboration. Now, they can use RingCentral Video in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).
This means healthcare professionals can discuss patient information using RingCentral Video conversations without compromising HIPAA guidelines. Like RingCentral’s cloud-based phone solution, which is already widely used by medical practices, RingCentral Video can now be used by nurses, doctors, and other healthcare providers. Both are part of RingCentral MVP, our comprehensive suite of communications and collaboration tools.
That is significant because there has never been a greater need for collaboration in healthcare especially with the increasing need for remote-friendly healthcare practices, and with healthcare leaders, insurers, and the government all promoting the importance of “care teams” that can coordinate care with the goal of better patient outcomes at a lower cost.
At the same time, there are great impediments to effective communication and collaboration in healthcare—including those same security and privacy regulations. Particularly frustrating are the rules that prevent healthcare professionals from taking advantage of the same mobile and social modes of communication they enjoy in their personal lives.
RingCentral Video offers the care team a more flexible way of discussing patients and their care, either from within a mobile app or a web browser. The RingCentral Video chat mimics the concise style of mobile texting, but messages can also include documents and images, with RingCentral’s image annotation, as a powerful way of commenting on specific parts of those images. Action items can be assigned as tasks for greater accountability. And everyone on the care team can stay up to date on what everyone else is doing.
Many physician practices have already learned to love RingCentral MVP because of its flexibility. For example, a doctor returning a patient’s call from home can use the RingCentral mobile app to place that call from a business phone line rather than the number for his personal smartphone. While these customers already had access to RingCentral Video at no additional cost, until now they couldn’t take advantage of it because of HIPAA requirements.
There is another sort of collaboration in healthcare that revolves around posting updates to electronic medical records systems and claims processing systems, which are held to a high standard of HIPAA compliance as permanent repositories of patient information. However, some of the greatest communication, coordination, and collaboration needs in healthcare occur in the short term, as caregivers discuss how a patient should be treated or address more basic matters like coordinating nursing schedules.
For example, a 2002 study of home healthcare published by the American Medical Informatics Association found that clinicians often hesitate to record information they need to collaborate about in the patient’s official medical record because they do not consider it official or final. Often, the quality of care depends just as much about the unofficial exchange of information about a patient and on healthcare workers sharing what they did during their last visit and plan to do on their next one. The greater the need for tight coordination, the more likely “the information in the patient record will likely only be a partial solution, since the interacting clinicians will require more information than is normally communicated through the patient record,” write the authors, David Pinelle and Carl Gutwin, from the University of Saskatchewan.
In other words, healthcare professionals need to be in constant communication, making and sharing plans, expressing hopes and concerns, and taking advantage of workplace technologies that are at least as powerful as those they enjoy in their personal lives.
Together, RingCentral MVP and RingCentral Video can be part of the answer.
Discover how the right communications platform can ensure both mobility and HIPAA compliance with your always-connected, frequently mobile healthcare workforce.
Originally published Feb 17, 2017, updated May 22, 2024
