Take Two Aspirin and Text Me in the Morning: Will healthcare technology implementations raise new privacy concerns?

Is the healthcare industry ready for secure texting?

A new HIPAA compliant texting app is in beta testing at about 80 hospitals around the US right now. It is secure, traceable, encrypted and recorded. In other words, the HIPAA aspects are all covered so physicians who use texting as a means of communication are no longer breaking the rules. But what about human error?

I love technology. I've made information technology my career. Technology touches nearly every part of my life. And, as I've said before, I am a technical early adopter.  I’m in favor of technical progress, new innovations, and using technology in as many ways as is possible to improve my life and work. Despite popular belief, a lot of doctors,
clinicians, and nurses are too.

I’m also as addicted to texting as anyone out there (OK, middle school kids might have one up on me) and I use it as a primary method of communication.

For those of you who know the feeling, you also know the feeling of sending the wrong text to the wrong person occasionally. What's to prevent a doctor, nurse, or a medical assistant from sending your information to another person via text?

Medical records are not always pristine. I have a colleague whose medical records are actually mixed with another person of the same name, stating he has ailments and a prescription regimen he is not actually on, and who receives mail for Medicare insurance despite the fact that he is in his 40's. That's an entirely different matter for later discussion, but it does have relevance.

If it can happen in the back office of a healthcare organization, it can certainly happen via text.

I can understand the need for instantaneous communication within a healthcare organization and can understand the benefits. The worst case scenario is that a texting app along with human error sends my information to the wrong department or doctor within an HCO. My information is not publicly compromised.

My concern is that human error via texts intended for me could do just that.

I’m sure technology providers and HCO's will secure my data with unique ID's such as a SSN, patient number, or something similar, but that’s only as good as the human doing the texting. I am sure mistakes aren't commonplace but, through my experiences working with technology and in healthcare IT staffing, they do happen on nearly every level of every organization.

A famous quote from Alexander Pope states, 'To err is human; to forgive, divine.'

On the surface I love the idea of texts from my doctor. Who wouldn't want information or test results as soon as they come in? I love the idea until the doctor sends it to my wife, or child, or mother by accident because they have the same last name, or initials.

I don't know how many people would forgive a mistake such as leaking private medical information in today's litigious society.

Perhaps a safer method would be that the texting is not actually sent by a human at all. Rather; it’s an integration into the EMR product that then sends out the texts to the phone number on file.

Unfortunately, although more secure, this brings up two other problems:

1. My phone number on record is wrong at two different doctor's offices I've visited in the in the last year alone due to moving; which means that whomever has my old number would receive my medical information. 


2. I often give my phone to a friend or relative to play a game, look at pictures, or hop on the web.  A big text box popping up with an image of my MRI results isn’t exactly information I want shared.

We discuss data security and healthcare in these blogs frequently and, I’m sorry but, unless there is a way (and maybe there is) that text providers can ensure texts are going to the right person; 100% of the time, without fail; this seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

I think I may have an alternate solution to reduce the chances of human error.

The large EMR vendors could develop a healthcare app for smart phones that ties into your electronic medical record for which you would have a secure login with a password and username that can't be stored. You can see the information as it gets put into your electronic records. It would be as simple as checking on your bank account online. You could sign up for instant notifications that alert you a new message has arrived, instead of sending the confidential information.

Regardless of the technology, employees at every level of healthcare organizations are craving a solution. Beta testing is just that: testing. Just because it works does not make it as functional and secure as it can be. We would be wise to make sure we have this right before a widespread beta roll-out turns out to be very wrong as a result of our desire to have the products now.

Josh Kaplan writes on various subjects including information technology breakthroughs, healthcare IT recruitment and innovations, big data, IT staffing and recruitment, and technical industry news and trends.

Finding the best technical employees: It’s less about who and more about training.

I was recently reading an article about informatics Baccalaureate programs that are emerging to help meet current and future demands of HCO’s and insurers with highly specific IT program needs. The story sparked a different, yet simple, idea to solving the problem of IT skill shortages in my mind.

How is your company dealing with the IT skills shortage?

My company works in both the engineering and technical sectors. The demand for engineers is high as baby boomers begin to retire and due to the fact that many members of the gen X, Millennial and Z workforce opted for careers in information technology as it was seen as a more lucrative path to follow.

The same can be said for certain sectors of IT today. Healthcare IT and mobile app developers have a unique shortage of skilled professionals on their hands because technologies are literally emerging every day.

We have very competent, very talented system admins, QA professionals, and programmers out in the job market and we still have industries telling us, as a staffing firm, that there is a shortage of available, qualified IT talent. They’re right; a shortage exists and they may be partly to blame.

Just as with engineering, the IT sector has a number of quality candidates in the marketplace actively seeking work, whether it’s for contract or long term positions. Yet there are still many capable, sometimes brilliant IT minds that go unemployed, underemployed or under-engaged in their work because they do not meet a niche skill set on a sheet of paper.

Obviously these professionals have an aptitude for learning new systems. After all, they are professionals in an industry where change is the norm.

So what’s the answer?

It’s simple: Training.

Many businesses have the mindset that IT pros should get the training on their own because they’ll probably jump ship before any sort of ROI is realized. I think the opposite is true; offer the training and you’ll retain your talent. Also, without input from business, how is an IT pro supposed to know what type of specialized training to invest in, if the specialized training even exists?

We have to get business, professionals, colleges and K-12 systems together to come up with a plan to develop our future workforce.  In the meantime, business can do a lot to help itself to a bumper crop of IT professionals if they put some resources toward training on new skill sets.

For example, we’re in the midst of developing a program plan to bring businesses together with trainers and mainstream programming professionals. Businesses tell us they need mobile app professionals now because mobile device use and available apps are increasing at an exponential rate. They also tell us there is a very distinct skill shortage. Training companies need customers. The programmers, with years of demonstrated success in platforms closely related to mobile app development (Java, C++, etc), get to learn a new, in-demand skill set to which they can apply their years of experience in the logic of programming.

A college grad can be great. But nothing can replace those years of experience backing the seasoned IT pros.

If you or your company seem to be wondering how you're going to deal with the skills shortage, the answer might be as simple as providing IT training.

Facebook for jobs? It’s time to SWOT up.

by Josh Kaplan

If you’re job hunting on job boards and corporate websites, you might be missing something right in front of you. It could be time to take Facebook more seriously.

18,000,000 Americans found their current job through Facebook. Not a date for Saturday night. Not a great new Vietnamese restaurant downtown. Not a video of a giant panda sneezing. They found a job. That’s equivalent to the combined populations of New York and L.A.

If professional connections are the serious side of social media, then Facebook is getting serious. And why wouldn’t it? At the end of the day, contacts and relationship management are the key to a strong career path and while Facebook may have been created as a means for people to share personal and informal information, its incursion into the world of work was inevitable.

For jobseekers, that means it’s time to think about how they use Facebook and where the dangers and possibilities lie. This week, we use a very business-led model to help you navigate the issues. We present a SWOT analysis of Facebook’s potential for jobseekers.

Strengths

Accessibility

Facebook has all the obvious benefits of any online media. – 24/7 access, live access and real time news and events.

Segmentation

If job advertisers want to reach the 35-50 year old market of engineers in Frederick, Maryland – they can. And they don’t have to pay for all the extraneous exposure. Expect to see this activity increase, especially among smaller employers with limited budgets.

Passive Job Seekers

Relevant jobs can land on your Facebook profile without you even asking for them. The best candidate for any job is a passive candidate. If you’re a company trying to recruit, finding a candidate from among active users on Monster or CareerBuilder may result in a great deal of competition with other employers.

Scale

500,000,000 people means massive potential in any context. Period.

Weaknesses

Generation gap

A great many of the key skills in most demand, particularly in engineering, are only available among a demographic group that is relatively inactive on Facebook.

Current functionality

While talk of Facebook-Jobs continues, current functionality,  does not allow users to silo content in the same way that Google+ does, so that your football buddies see one thing and your business contacts see another.  G+ may be dead on arrival, but it would have been of greater benefit for jobseekers in time.

Opportunities

Future Functionality

Whatever Facebook lacks, it can develop - and based on its track record, it probably will.

Overall Market share

In the online job world, market share is very important. Monster is great example. If you’re first, you have a major advantage in attracting investment and reinvesting in marketing to further boost your intake. At that point, it’s your ball to drop. Facebook does not drop the ball very often and they are a light year out in front of the pack.

Threats

Work / Life balance

It remains to be seen if Facebook users en masse simply don’t want to integrate their personal lives with work. They may look for an entirely different product, just on principal. (Someone run down to the basement and dust off Google+?)

Fear of Embarrassment

We’ve all seen those e-mail examples of Facebook mistakes and misjudgments. It has ended marriages and careers too. Many people may choose to stay on Linked-In rather than risk their career and reputation by linking their CEO to their college roommate. This may threaten Facebook’s ability to control the market.

So there it is, early days for Facebook as a dominating online job resource. One thing is certain, it is currently playing a role in landing people work. The question is whether it can bring one of the side benefits of its model into a central role without compromising its central purpose.