How HIPAA Compliance Affects The Medical Translations Industry

How HIPAA Compliance Affects The Medical Translations Industry

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How HIPAA Compliance Affects The Medical Translations Industry

Medical translation plays a crucial role in bridging the communication gaps between medical providers and their multilingual clients. According to Joint Commission Standards and Healthcare Compliance Law, hospitals need to find translators that can help convey important and personal health information (PHI) to Limited English Proficient speakers. However, it is crucial to keep this confidential info private and prevent disclosures to unauthorized persons. These standards are included in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

How HIPAA Compliance Affects The Medical Translations Industry

In consideration of these two policies, hospitals need to assure that their medical translators value the privacy and clarity of information they translate. It is important the language service provider is HIPAA compliant and has legal certifications to perform their job.

How does HIPAA compliance work with medical translation services?

For the security of patients’ PHI, it is crucial for medical translation services to undergo thorough quality assurance and high-security measures. From the safe and secure file transfers to the actual translation process and turnaround of the project, everything must be highly confidential. 

For example, the translators cannot request or send files via email as this would violate the HIPAA regulations. Instead, they can use encrypted file-sharing platforms that can securely transfer files. This is because emails are prone to cyberhacking, and any malicious entities that could breach these data could use the patient’s PHI for identity fraud. 

When this happens, the medical providers and translators need to inform all the affected patients about the situation. In the end, your reputation will be compromised as your patients lose their trust in your hospital.

Thus, the hospitals need to ensure that the medical translation services they will get are HIPAA compliant. As such, they should have an effective project management portal that will secure the document uploads and downloads. Their network of professional translators must also have adequate training regarding the security assurance processes.

Here are the things that hospitals must do before hiring medical translators:

  • Assess the privacy risk of the company that provides medical translation services.
  • Provide proper guidelines regarding information access in the vendor-client agreement.
  • Set terms and conditions to ensure that the medical translator will meet the regulatory compliance.
  • Outline and sign contracts to outline the business relationship between the healthcare providers and medical translation providers.

The issues in the security of patients PHI

Due to recent technological advancement, the healthcare system has adapted to modern processes and changed its paper-based system with electronic health records. This helped in providing more convenient and cost-effective services to their patients. Aside from that, it also improved the disease diagnosis, patient cooperation, and access to health information.

However, it also puts the patients’ PHI at risk for data breaches and cyber-attacks. Due to the software vulnerability, human errors, and security failures, the important information became more susceptible to unauthorized and malicious people. According to a report,  over 41.2 million healthcare data were illegally disclosed in 2019.

Data breaches also lead to medical identity theft, and fortunately, the latter is preventable. Many healthcare providers are already using RightPatient to identify patients accurately at any touchpoint across the care continuum. However, it can also be used to prevent medical identity theft in real-time by verifying patients’ identities and red-flagging bad actors – protecting patient data and mitigating costs in the process.

Coming back to the point, the medical providers are extra careful when disclosing their patient’s PHI to third parties such as the language service providers (LSP) online. They use encrypted file-sharing or FTP clients for secured data sharing. If they are accidentally sent via email, the message should be deleted from the inbox and deleted folder. Aside from that, all PHI files must be deleted from the LSP’s computer after the project. 

What should you expect from your medical translator?

All the businesses, including the medical translation services, under HIPAA compliance must ensure the security and confidentiality of their project. An LSP’s network of translators must understand the importance of the patient’s privacy and do their best to avoid data breaches. The hospitals must also do a thorough screening to ensure that the translators are HIPAA compliant.

Here are some of the things that hospitals must consider when finding medical translators:

1. HIPAA Training

Ensure the LSP’s medical translators and proofreaders have undergone official HIPAA training. There are numerous training and courses that they could avail themselves of online or even in agencies. If they haven’t done this, the healthcare providers must move on to another company.

2. Experience of Medical Translators

Remember that in medicine, the accuracy and security of information are important. Thus, instead of hiring new applicants, hire seasoned medical translations or a company that can offer expertise in the industry. What’s even better in choosing an agency instead of freelancers is that you can put more confidence in the confidentiality of your patient’s PHI.

3. Business Associate Screening

A lot of medical translation companies claim that they are HIPAA-compliant even if they are not. Thus, it is important to ask for supporting documents and proofs regarding their claims. Make sure that they went through a strict investigation process that verifies their translation management and IT infrastructure.

4. Screening LSPs medical translators

After the agency, the network of medical translators of an LSP must be assessed through a rigorous screening process. The company should have strict criteria and ensure a solid compliant process when finding medical translators.

5. ISO Certifications

Aside from undergoing strict screenings, medical translators need to have ISO certifications. This will help ensure the accuracy, IT policies, and data security of the medical translations. It also certifies the legitimacy of the company that you’re partnering with.

6. Solid IT Infrastructure

It is essential to ensure the sufficiency of the security systems of your LSP. This will help in securing the confidentiality of your patients’ PHI to avoid data breaches in the future. As you know, some medical translation companies use translation software for a faster turnaround of the projects. In these cases, ask for an assurance that these tools will not breach the HIPAA compliance at all costs or just cross it out from the options.

7. HIPAA Audit and Assurance

Aside from the medical translation process, the LSP must have its own way to check the HIPAA compliance of every project. They should also have an extensive process to ensure that there are no errors and mistranslations to the documents. This is essential to ensure that the company is organized enough to ensure the security of the patients’ files.

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4 Common Challenges in Clinical Trials – How Are You Addressing Them?

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4-Common-Challenges-in-Clinical-Trials-RightPatient

We’ve talked at length about the challenges in hospitals, health systems, telehealth, and other aspects of the U.S. healthcare system. Today, let’s take a step back and look at challenges in clinical trials – invaluable studies without which there would be no advances in healthcare.

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Preventing professional patients is an overlooked issue in clinical trials.

Clinical trials in a nutshell

Clinical trials have been around since ancient times. In fact, the first clinical trial can be traced back to biblical times – in 500 B.C.! Since then, there have been many changes and updates to how these trials are carried out as well as standards that have to be followed to ensure they are ethical.

Clinical trials are conducted to develop drugs, devices, or procedures that can improve human health. These trials mainly help identify whether the drugs are safe, have any side effects, and can be used by the general population. 

While clinical trials used to be a very niche topic, its popularity skyrocketed due to the pandemic. Since the novel virus hit the world, virtually everyone has been asking the same question – when will there be a vaccine? Unfortunately, everyone skips over the challenges in clinical trials and they aren’t discussed as much as the vaccine itself. However, that’s exactly what we’ll look at today – some common challenges faced by organizations to carry out these complex, expensive trials.

4 common challenges in clinical trials

Clinical trials are not at all easy – they’re quite complex, lengthy, and are required to follow several rules and regulations to ensure compliance with different standards. Before starting a clinical trial and while running it, organizations face a number of challenges.

Slower patient recruitment than required

One of the biggest challenges is faced just before starting clinical trials, and it’s all about patient recruitment. Moreover, this is the stage that often determines whether the clinical trial will successfully commence or not as around 80% of these studies are either halted or even closed due to low patient recruitment. One of the reasons for this is the specific requirements of the trial. For instance, the trial requires patients to have a particular condition, but patients have other conditions as well which might lead to complications – finding the right patients proves to be quite a challenge indeed.  

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RightPatient addresses one of the overlooked clinical trial challenges – preventing professional patients.

One way many sponsors deal with this is by setting realistic expectations and assuming the fact that not all of their sites will attract the desired number of patients. Another way sponsors tackle the challenge is by outsourcing recruitment since there are several organizations available that specialize in doing so.

Compliance with several rules and regulations

Overcoming the patient recruitment challenge is just the beginning as there’s another herculean task. Ensuring compliance with the rules and regulations has to be ensured throughout the duration of the trial, as it cannot be completed successfully unless the trial conforms to the rules and regulations to a T.

Since trials are full of complex activities, involve human subjects, untested drugs, devices, and procedures, ensuring compliance becomes mandatory to ensure patient safety as well as maintaining ethics of the trials. Usually, institutional review boards (IRBs) have to approve the processes, and that can be time-consuming as there are many factors to consider, which often create a bottleneck.

Managing multiple sites

While clinical trials usually occur over multiple sites to involve diverse patients, more sites mean more vendors, procedures, diverse compliance requirements, and coordination efforts, leading to more complexities down the line. 

Creating a robust policy of how to deal with multiple sites and coordinate with one another is one of the only ways forward. Moreover, ensuring accurate patient records and properly managing patients is an absolute must to prevent mix-ups, inconsistencies, and ensure compliance. 

Preventing professional patients

Professional patients, or duplicate subjects, are an overlooked but significant issue that hampers clinical trials and threatens the integrity of the trials they participate in. Professional patients sign up for multiple trials either simultaneously or consecutively, which seriously affects the clinical trials. They can even lead to skewing overall data which might render promising drugs unusable since the data shows that the drugs are not effective enough.

Not only do professional patients harm themselves, but they cause billions of dollars in losses or delays in approvals from pharmaceutical regulatory agencies. As a result, preventing professional patients is a must – something which RightPatient can help with. 

RightPatient is a leading touchless biometric patient identification platform that ensures patients are accurately identified across the care continuum – several hospitals and health systems are already using it. Fortunately, it can prevent professional patients in clinical trials as well by validating that the patients’ identities and checking whether they are currently participating in other active trials or not. Not only can RightPatient help reduce significant losses, but it also helps protect the integrity of clinical trials – reducing errors and preventing professional patients from participating.

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The Benefits of Telehealth and How to Ensure Patient Safety During Virtual Visits

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RightPatient-augments-the-benefits-of-telehealth

Telehealth is nothing new – it has been around for quite some time now, especially in the U.S. Unfortunately, its potential was not fully realized before the pandemic because healthcare providers were too wary about using it whereas pundits were busy arguing and analyzing the drawbacks and benefits of telehealth. As a result, not many patients were exposed to virtual visits – leading to telehealth becoming nothing more than a rarely used add-on that was just collecting dust in the drawer of unused tools, figuratively speaking. However, as we all know, the pandemic changed everything, and telehealth became essential. The pandemic allowed telehealth to show its potential as it was quickly thrust into the limelight.

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RightPatient prevents medical identity theft during virtual sessions

Let’s take a look at how virtual sessions are transforming healthcare, the benefits of telehealth for everyone involved, and how patient safety can be ensured during these remote patient visits.

How telehealth became relevant again

Technology has slowly but steadily become an integral part of the U.S. healthcare system – AI, wearables, machine learning, and other technologies are being tested to detect whether they improve healthcare outcomes for the masses or not. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, it was ignored due to a number of factors, and the benefits of telehealth were also overlooked. One of the biggest advantages of telehealth is that it offers patient care beyond the walls of hospitals and health systems. This basically means that patients can get care right from the comfort of their homes or anywhere they want – enabling true, remote care. The future of telehealth looked quite promising. 

And then, a certain novel virus overwhelmed the entire world and burdened healthcare systems. 

Hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients as they were coming in huge numbers – healthcare facilities had to allocate all their resources to serve patients. Moreover, due to the nature of the virus, other patients were not allowed into hospitals and they were diverted towards telehealth – the rest is history.

Telehealth’s usage increased dramatically as regular patients started using it and caregivers started adopting different telehealth platforms to accommodate their patients. While telehealth’s usage has been slowing down somewhat, it’s still here to stay. 

That being said, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of telehealth enjoyed by patients and healthcare providers.

Benefits of telehealth

It makes healthcare more convenient than ever

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RightPatient ensures patient safety during telehealth visits

Before telehealth became a force to be reckoned with, many patients had to travel long distances to see their physicians in person, something that is cumbersome, expensive, and inconvenient. However, thanks to telehealth, patients can see their physicians from their preferred locations. Patients don’t need to travel miles – all they need is an internet connection and a communication device. Patients can simply book an appointment, get the link to the virtual session, and consult with their physician(s) at the location and time that works best for them – making a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Moreover, telehealth helps globetrotting physicians provide healthcare services to their patients while they’re out of the country – ensuring that all of their patients are cared for.

It enables remote access to healthcare services

One of the biggest advantages of telehealth is that it takes healthcare out of the hospitals, that is, it enables patients to get healthcare services from the comfort and safety of their homes. Telehealth was extremely helpful when the pandemic hit in full force. It was one of the key instruments that helped reduce infections since it helped patients receive care without putting themselves at risk of contracting the virus by visiting hospitals.

However, with the pandemic, telehealth has also shown how useful it can be in providing remote care to patients that either cannot come to healthcare facilities or are not willing to. Since most patients are now familiar with telehealth, healthcare providers are also investing heavily into it – some are developing their own telehealth platforms whereas others are using established solutions to support their patients.

While telehealth can never fully replace inpatient visits that are required for lab tests, surgeries, etc., it can handle patients that have chronic diseases but are not able to visit hospitals. All in all, telehealth’s future looks bright, something that was uncertain before the pandemic.

It reaches more patients

Most patients usually prefer going to the closest healthcare provider for check-ups and getting treatment. However, many live in rural areas and do not have the means to travel to the city. Fortunately, telehealth breaks down that barrier as it does not impose any physical limitations – a patient can consult a physician that is thousands of miles away. This opens up new opportunities for the caregivers as they can serve a larger population. 

There’s more to telehealth

While there is no doubt that telehealth is here to stay, it’s still in its early years and can put patient safety at risk. For instance, during telehealth sessions, patients can face the same issues they do during inpatient visits, such as patient misidentification. Moreover, many experts are concerned about medical identity theft that might occur with telehealth visits. Fortunately, RightPatient can help prevent that – improving quality and safety in healthcare. 

RightPatient enhances patient safety

A leading touchless patient identification platform, RightPatient is being used by caregivers to protect patients from healthcare fraud, medical record mix-ups, and more. RightPatient can also be used across the care continuum, making it ideal for telehealth sessions. It helps patients validate their identities, preventing medical identity theft by red-flagging fraudsters.

RightPatient supports telehealth sessions as well as inpatient visits – contact us now to learn how we can help enhance patient safety for your healthcare facility.

8 Ways Hospitals Put Patient Safety First

8 Ways Hospitals Put Patient Safety First

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8 Ways Hospitals Put Patient Safety First

When you take a patient to the doctor or a hospital, you expect that all their treatments will be free of danger. Physicians and other healthcare providers should minimize the risk of infection and error while attempting to make their patients as comfortable as possible. The ultimate goal is that no patients are harmed. Physicians, nurses, dentists, and other healthcare workers can help make going to the doctor or the hospital a positive experience for patients.

8 Ways Hospitals Put Patient Safety First

Patients are a hospital’s number one priority and healthcare facilities always do the best possible strategies to ensure that their patients remain safe and healthy within their facilities. Here are some of the common ways hospitals use to guarantee that their patients’ safety is prioritized. 

1. Using A Monitoring System

Each healthcare worker is responsible for caring for varying numbers of patients, each with different needs and medications. Using a monitoring system can help nurses and physicians ensure that they are doing their job correctly and keeping a close eye on patient needs.

By using technology such as bed alarms to notify staff if a patient falls, the healthcare industry is helping patients remain safe in the background—hospital monitoring systems such as these assist in spotting and avoiding human error.

2. Preventing Contamination

If you’ve ever had any surgery, you know that the equipment can generate some smoke. An electrosurgical smoke eliminator, which often serves as an attachment to electrosurgery, is a tool that’s used to remove some of the smoke that may be seen during surgeries. This product helps to prevent the particles from circulating in the air before they have a chance to enter the body. Contamination can be controlled in various ways, for example, washing hands more often, providing handwashing stations, and making sure everyone wears protective equipment like masks, scrubs, and disposable surgical gloves when handling patients.

3. Hygiene Is Essential

Strictly enforced rules and regulations have a substantial impact on patient safety. It’s one of the most effective ways to control germs and the spread of infections in hospitals. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers should be used regularly and patients should be taught about the importance of hand hygiene should be discussed extensively. Doctors take control of their patient’s health by washing their hands before going into the treatment room.

4. Educating Patients About Their Treatment

Eliminating the patients’ ignorance about their medical treatment and well-being is vital to ensuring patient safety. Patients needn’t be fully aware of their situation, but higher knowledge levels are still desirable. The strategy of simply reminding patients what they’ve been told has considerable evidence of use in patient safety initiatives. Patients and family members are primarily concerned with their well-being. For recognizing and preventing errors, you’re helping them stay on track with their treatment and medication.

5. Ensuring Positive Patient Identification

One of the more overlooked issues within the US healthcare system is patient identification errors and they hamper patient safety significantly. Patient misidentification causes patient data quality issues, medical record mix-ups, wrong transplants, detrimental health outcomes, and even deaths. Fortunately, responsible healthcare providers are using innovative solutions like RightPatient, a touchless biometric patient identification platform, to ensure patient safety by eliminating patient misidentification. 

6. Verifying Test Results Before Operations

We’ve all heard the accounts of people who had their right knee replaced and received a botched operation—verification processes in the hospital procedure help combat frequent errors like these. Another kind of verification is the Universal Protocol, which allows any surgical team member to take a “time out” if they feel that the details of the surgery may be inaccurate. However, other aspects of healthcare use checks on medication dosage, timing, and handwashing procedures are essential to verification.

7. Checking the Dosage

Medical professionals can help patients closely examine the medications provided and ensure that proper doses are supplied on the prescription. Many of the remedies contain abbreviations that can sometimes be difficult to distinguish. Another popular abbreviation used that has no real-world meaning is once a day or the given dose. When it comes to these acronyms, one of the crucial actions of the organizations is to keep them out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them. If medications are spelled out, the information is visible for everyone to see.

8. Performing the Needed Diagnostic Testing

Doctors will often check the patient’s bloodwork or other bodily functions to find out what’s happening. Tests are completed, but additional tests impede the patient’s welfare. The doctor must examine the tests and the patient’s current and future health comprehensively to see if there are any medications required or any options available to deal with the condition. The doctor should also ensure no side effects following the treatment.

Takeaway

Doctors, physicians, nurses, and other medical practitioners should be held to the highest standards. They’re taking people’s lives into their hands. Even the smallest of errors could result in injury, illness, or death. They make sure to follow every safety protocol because they need to be careful at all times making sure that the safety of their patients is one of the topmost priorities. By following the ways listed above, hospitals can ensure that their patients are always healthy and safe from harm.