Taking Advantage of a HIPAA-Compliant Business VoIP Solution

Most U.S. citizens are familiar with HIPAA standards, designed to protect privacy and the sensitive information of patients in the healthcare field. Healthcare organizations are required by law to observe the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and that has far-reaching ramifications when it comes to the type of technology they use.

Phone systems in particular are required to be HIPAA-compliant, for the purposes of call recording and the gathering and storage of analytics and other important data. Business VoIP systems inherently lend themselves to HIPAA compliance as they are designed to move and store data. Specifically, HIPAA requires healthcare providers to collect and protect all information they receive, through phone, fax, mobile app or the web.

Specifically, HIPAA mandates that patients’ names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers must be protected. Patients’ physical and mental health conditions, care for those conditions, and payment information related to those conditions, must also be securely protected. This ensures privacy and confidentiality for patients while also simplifying paperwork, recordkeeping and healthcare claims for providers.

In the business VoIP realm, Nextiva is one of the companies offering fully HIPAA-compliant solutions for healthcare organizations. The company’s VoIP platform features call recording and voicemail, enabling healthcare providers to store call data in compliance with HIPAA mandates. Nextiva’s offerings are designed on the company’s core NextOS platform, located in data centers throughout North America. Those centers offer top security protocols to protect against data breaches, and the company also requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to further protect its services.

As a full service communications platform, Nextiva offers a number of services that are not HIPAA compliant, but are certainly beneficial to customers outside the healthcare realm. The company limits and disables those services in its healthcare offerings, ensuring it maintains HIPAA compliance. Those features include visual voicemail, the ability to email voicemail messages as attachments and the ability to play voicemail messages through the company’s NextOS and Nextiva Unity Apps. The company also disables voicemail transcription and removes its vFAX and Nextiva Drive services from its healthcare solutions.

HIPAA compliance doesn’t need to be a chore, and healthcare organizations can take advantage of all the major benefits of a business VoIP solution while also maintaining compliance.