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Suppose a specialist physician in California is corresponding with a patient in Texas who has an urgent illness. The physician wants to schedule an emergency appointment, but needs to review the patient's medical imaging studies to properly confirm and address the diagnosis. The patient could send a CD hard copy of their studies through the mail, but this is costly and wastes valuable time. The CD could also get lost in transit or arrive to the physician broken or unreadable. 

If you've been following our blog, you know by now that providing patients with electronic access to their medical images is cheaper and more efficient than burning and delivering CD copies. Giving patients online access to their images also offers many additional marketing benefits for your practice and easier access for your patients.

There's still a cost for this service, but you can expect it to be less than providing CDs. In either case, more and more providers and hospitals are integrating a HIPAA charge for medical records to help cover the expenses incurred by providing patients with copies of their images.

Sharing medical images in a HIPAA-noncompliant fashion is a violation of patient privacy that can expose you to large fines and potentially criminal liability. But what exactly constitutes a HIPAA violation? In theory, the actions that constitute HIPAA violations are straightforward: sharing what's considered to be private health information (PHI) with someone who's not supposed to receive it.

But from this simple definition, HIPAA violations related to medical images in particular, can take many forms, including exposing a patient's medical images to a vendor who does not have a Business Associates Agreement (BAA), sharing images with a family member or spouse without the patient's written consent, losing a laptop computer or cell phone containing protected medical information, or even mailing a medical image to the wrong address.

This blog will present guidelines for remaining HIPAA compliant, sharing images, protecting patient privacy, and reducing your risk of violating HIPAA rules and regulations.

Most cloud-based Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have a maximum useful life of somewhere in the range of five to ten years. If you're a doctor and your system is nearing that age or older, you need to begin considering your backup plan and budget for replacing a new one.

DICOM files are an essential part of the diagnosis process for many practices. Currently, the standard method for transferring DICOM data is via CDs. However, if your practice has ever burned or received a CD with a patient's data on it you've likely thought to yourself: "there has to be a better way." The good news is, there is!