Your patients rely on your practice not only to offer the highest quality care, but also maintain a high level of confidentiality for your personal records.
Your patients rely on your practice not only to offer the highest quality care, but also maintain a high level of confidentiality for your personal records.
Modern dentistry is founded in proactive strategies that are meant to help maintain a healthy smile such as fluoride treatments, regular dental cleanings and X-rays. Your patients trust you to be the authority in providing top-notch dental care, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your team is experts in all the non-dental technology on the market. Government privacy and compliance requirements continue to grow in complexity, and this can take time away from critical patient care and reduce the effectiveness of your teams. Fortunately, with the right support structure in place, you can easily protect the confidentiality of your patients and maintain compliance with HIPAA and other standards.
Dental offices offer a wealth of personal information from healthcare specifics to financial details about payment options. Each piece of data must be fully protected while in transit between workstations or offsite data storage facilities as well as when it’s at rest or being stored. Creating a dedicated protection strategy for your patient data starts with comprehensive mapping solutions that ensure your data is completely defined and accounted for, with strategies in place for protection throughout the lifecycle of the information.
Unlike some businesses, dental practices can’t exactly run a sale to generate additional revenue during difficult times. Instead, you’re generally managing growth more organically and that can be particularly vital to ensure that your technology infrastructure costs stay in line with practice revenue. From practice management systems to the very latest in dental technology, there are always new investments to be made in the business. It’s integral to your ongoing competitiveness in the market to be able to offer the latest in dental tech but your expense structure could easily be derailed by an unexpected and excessive bill from IT service providers. Working with a trusted IT managed services provider allows you to budget effectively and plan for major expenditures instead of having to scramble in the event of a technology outage or quick-turn response need.
Providing patients with the highest quality of care is often challenging, especially when you consider the increasing complexity required by HIPAA compliance and other data security and compliance requirements. According to a recent letter from the American Dental Association, some of the changes that were recently requested by the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights could cause undue difficulties for smaller organizations. “A small or solo health care provider would be particularly burdened by a shorter time frame (for compliance and patient notification), which could divert staff time and attention from clinical tasks and patient care without a corresponding benefit to patients or providers,” Drs. Cole and O’Loughlin noted. One of the ways that many dental practices are combatting this issue is through outsourcing some or all of their IT services to a trusted provider.
At NOVA Computer Solutions, our team specializes in working with high-touch businesses with multiple compliance challenges such as dental practices. Contact us today at 888-711-3234 for a free initial consultation, or you can always fill out our quick online form to learn more about the technology solutions that we provide.
