How To Email Patient Health Information Securely and For Free and Make HIPAA Happy

HIPAA is a terrifying adjective that most dentists either don’t care about or are entirely frustrated with. The newest problem in the list of things you need to be ready for  with HIPAA is securing your method for transmitting patient health information to other doctors.

Well dentists I have a solution for you.

Here is the key to being able to send an email with patient information. The data has to have what is called End to End encryption. This means that you enter a password and some software uses that password to encrypt the data you are sending and the doctor at the other end has the password as well to unlock the encryption.

HIPAA has yet to declare if your email provider needs to sign a BAA with you or not if all the data in your email is encrypted and the email provider has no access to it.

But to be safe check out this page and get a BAA with google for your professional GMAIL account.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/3407054?hl=en

HIPAA wants you to send this information through your email and the end doctors email via a method that encrypts the data. The great way to do this is to encrypt the phi in a PDF, password protect it and send that.

In this video I use a FREE PDF creator called PDFCreator to do exactly this. Very simple, easy and no monthly or start up fees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8tCCLxHtjDo