68% of physician offices report using text messaging services to communicate with patients.
While there are a lot of physicians that utilize this service, it’s important to know that widespread use does not mean that it’s compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations.
Understanding if texting patients is okay, and what regulations you need to keep in mind before starting texting patients is important.
In today’s blog, we will be discussing when you can text patients, what the regulations are, and the appropriate reasons and times for texting. We will also be discussing the advantages of using a texting service.
Table of Contents
Is Texting Patients Allowed?
A lot of physician offices are currently using messaging systems to text patients. These systems seem very convenient…but are they compliant with HIPAA and TCPA? Furthermore, how difficult is it to stay compliant?
According to HIPAA, you can text patients but you need to stay compliant with their regulations.
Making sure to train your staff to only send out messages that are compliant with these regulations is an important step to staying compliant.
It’s also important that you give the patient an option to enroll in the texting services. Texting patients is also allowed under the TCPA, it again requires consent from the patient and restricts the amount of messages that get sent to the patient.
Texting patients can be helpful to a physician's office, but it’s important to keep in mind the regulations you need to follow.
Regulations to Keep in Mind When Texting Patients
Before deciding to implement a system that allows you to text patients, it's important to understand the required regulations.
So what are they?
The main regulations would be HIPAA and TCPA. HIPAA is the regulation that requires healthcare providers and any businesses that handle protected health information (PHI) to secure it.
What patient information needs to remain protected?
Names
Patients Birthdate
Patients Contact information
Health Records
The other regulation is the TCPA, this regulation restricts the amount of solicitation consumers receive.
This regulation allows consumers to remove themselves from a texting program, this could be by texting, stop, remove, etc. The TCPA does not allow automated text messages to be sent before 8 am or after 9 pm depending on the patient's current time zone.
What Compliant Patient Texting Looks Like
So now that you know what regulations you have to follow, how do you stay compliant with HIPAA?
The most important thing to do is to make sure consent exists before you start messaging. A few other important aspects to keep in mind include…
Ensuring the texting service that’s being used is also HIPAA-compliant
Encrypting your website
Enforcing strict privacy policies to help protect the patient's information
These simple steps will help you make sure that you stay compliant with HIPAA and do not get penalized. If you’re being non-compliant, you will receive a fine. A HIPAA fine can cost upwards of 1.5 million dollars in penalties.
To stay compliant with the TCPA regulations, receiving consent from the customer is again a necessity. The healthcare organizations also need to ensure the customer can opt out at any time and make sure you don't contact a customer who has requested to be on the do not call list.
Another thing you need to do to stay compliant is to only contact patients during the appropriate time according to the current TCPA regulations. Following these regulations will help you stay compliant and avoid any unnecessary penalties.
The penalty will stay around $500 and up to $1,500. But, you do risk getting sued which could be a multi-million dollar lawsuit. If you do not want to risk being noncompliant you can contact us at Etactics. We can help with formatting text messages to ensure you stay HIPAA and TCPA-compliant.
Appropriate Reasons to Text Patients
There are a lot of things you need to think about before you start using a text message service, that does not have to do with HIPAA compliance. One thing is to understand why you can text a patient.
The appropriate reasons to text a patient:
Confirming an Appointment
Appointment Reminders
Overdue Payments
Directing Patients to Complete Pre-Appointment Documents
Completion of Medications
Let’s walk through an example.
Let’s say a patient has an appointment at 3 pm. You have your text message service automatically send a reminder to the patient an hour before the appointment. The patient responds to the text and says that they cannot make it. This gives the physician's office a heads up that the patient will not be there and it allows the office to call people that may be on the waiting list.
Sending out patients reminders can help reduce no-shows, and help streamline the appointment process.
But be careful.
If you were to send a message that detailed a patient's condition and gave out any of the patient's information you could risk being non-compliant and receive a hefty fine.
Appropriate Times to Text a Patient
If you’re texting a patient, when would be the appropriate time to text them?
You should only be texting patients during normal office hours; typically 8 am - 5 pm.
Seems easy enough. However, make sure you keep in mind the zone the patient is in if you’re sending messages in a different time zone.
Texting patients outside of these hours can seem invasive to the patient receiving the text message and could cause them to ignore the text all together.
Is there any time you should avoid messaging a patient?
During rush hours, which would be around 8 o’clock and 5 o’clock. You should avoid sending messages if possible during these times. Most people are driving during these two times…and you don’t want to inadvertently prompt texting and driving. In general, making sure you avoid these times can help increase patient responses.
Advantages of Texting Patients
Now that we have discussed what you have to keep in mind when texting patients, it may seem overwhelming.
You may be thinking, why should you get involved with texting patients with all of the rules and regulations?
There are a lot of advantages to using texting services that can improve the physician's office.
When texting patients you can send out patient reminders to help reduce any and all no-call no-shows. Sure, you can establish a no-show policy and send out no-show letters…but the goal is to reduce them overall.
If a patient cannot make the appointment, they can follow the prompt that tells the office that they have to cancel.
Before appointments, the texting service can also send a message with a link, to have the patient check-in online.
Your office can have this link go to any pre-appointment paperwork that may be requiring a signature. Having this resource can help reduce the wait at the office desk when checking in and help the office staff become more productive.
The texting service can also send out surveys to the patients after their appointment, this can help increase the overall satisfaction the patient has with the physician or office.
Conclusion
Ensuring that you keep up to date with HIPAA and TCPA regulations will help you save money by staying compliant.
Texting patients can be very helpful for physician offices by sending automated messages, instead of doing physical phone calls. This can give staff more time to be productive by completing additional tasks that they may not have previously been able to.
Texting a patient can seem complicated, but it can help streamline the process of patient intake, reducing no-shows and increasing overall satisfaction.
