Can Your Clinic Really Text Patients Safely Without Breaking the Rules?

Somebody at your clinic is texting patients from their own phone. I’d bet money on it. Maybe it’s the front desk, maybe a nurse who got tired of playing phone tag, maybe the doctor. It works, so nobody stops it. Meanwhile the practice has spent a small fortune on epic electronic medical records , which is a serious system with serious security, and then the actual conversations with patients happen on a personal iPhone with a cracked screen. That’s the gap. HIPAA compliant text messaging is how you close it, and plenty of clinics don’t think about it until something breaks. At Doc Response we run into this constantly. A locked-down chart on one side, a free-for-all on the other. So here’s how the two pieces fit, where people mess up, and what to do about it. What the Chart System Is Really Doing All Day Epic is huge, everybody knows the name. Hospitals use it, big groups use it, and a lot of smaller offices touch it through partners or referrals. But what’s it doing, really? It holds t...