The convenience and efficiency of sending text messages and SMS messages on a mobile device—like an iOS iPhone or Android—has led to a shift in the way healthcare organizations interact with patients. 

Healthcare providers have adopted secure messaging solutions as a way to improve patient care and facilitate better doctor-to-patient communication. And in telemedicine apps, chat messages often contain protected health information (PHI), so it is crucial that you consider HIPAA compliance and HIPAA regulations when building your in-app chat and messaging.

About HIPAA compliant messaging 

With HIPAA-compliant messaging applications, doctors and healthcare providers can share PHI with patients. This includes x-ray images, lab results, or information such as an address or telephone phone number. Rather than relying on sending paper records or phone calls, in-app HIPAA-compliant chat apps give patients and healthcare providers a way to quickly and securely communicate with one another. 

As secure messaging platforms continue to evolve at a fast pace, it’s important to understand that security measures must be in place to protect sensitive patient data and maintain compliance. In this guide, we will explore how to ensure HIPAA-compliant texting in your application, and the key benefits they offer to healthcare organizations and patients. 

HIPAA-Compliant Messaging Apps: Texting and Patient Relationships

Apart from the technical safeguards that are used to protect patient data, healthcare professionals and care teams can utilize HIPAA-compliant texting solutions to enhance virtual and in-person communication between healthcare providers and patients. 

Below, we’ll dive into some of the key benefits of having HIPAA-compliant messaging in your app. 

Improve patient-doctor communication with HIPAA compliant texting

With secure in-app text messaging, patients can quickly and easily share important details with doctors and healthcare staff like PHI, lab results, and medical records—fostering two-way engagement between patients and doctors.

Increase efficiency between care teams with HIPAA compliant messaging apps

Another major benefit of implementing HIPAA-compliant messaging is that it gives healthcare organizations the ability to streamline administrative workflow, which improves care team productivity through user-friendly scheduling features and real-time patient presence that help to reduce no-show follow-ups and wait times. This allows healthcare organizations to spend more time focused on delivering personalized patient care.

HIPAA compliant messaging can reduce response times in emergency situations

Real-time HIPAA-compliant secure text allows healthcare providers to remotely communicate with patients regardless of physical barriers. And since the pandemic, this instant communication is vital, as it allows patients dealing with emergency situations to remotely connect with doctors via secure in-app chat—reducing overall response times—and helping to ensure that patients receive faster care.

Ultimately, if you’re developing an application where sensitive patient information is going to be exchanged between patients, doctors, or care providers, HIPAA-compliant messaging is needed for proper data protection.

HIPAA-Compliant Texting and Telehealth

Another important factor to take into account is that standard text messages and SMS messages are usually not considered a form of secure texting. This means that when you send or receive these types of messages, they are not presented as secure messages in transit and can be easily accessed by unauthorized users. 

For instance, some text messaging platforms are designed to specifically send appointment reminders or regular SMS text messages to patients.

However, they do not always offer encrypted or secure text messaging for sharing protected health information. 

So if you’re developing a HIPAA-compliant texting app, you’ll want to ensure that there are secure features built-in to your texting solution to protect sensitive patient data. But to truly ensure security and compliance in your doctor-patient chat, choosing to build chat directly into your healthcare or telemedicine platform is your best bet. 

Features of HIPAA-Compliant Texting App

HIPAA-compliant chat and messaging SDKs allow developers to quickly and easily get up and running. With pre-built chat and UI components, you have full control over how you want to build—from the look and feel to the functionality.

Let's explore how you can build a customized HIPAA-compliant messaging platform to fit your needs. 

Go beyond chat with additional real-time HIPAA compliant app features

A HIPAA-compliant text messaging solution with real-time chat, secure file and image sharing, and scheduling features allows healthcare organizations to provide better quality care to patients. Beyond chat, you can enhance your HIPAA-compliant app with additional features like notifications, typing indicators, and presence detection, allowing patients to be notified when their doctor is available and vice versa, enabling faster response times. Additionally, presence can be used for real-time location tracking to make sure that patients get to the nearest care facility.

Integrate HIPAA compliant messaging apps with other third party services

Secure and easy-to-use features are crucial for healthcare applications, and to expand your care offerings, a HIPAA-compliant messaging solution should also be able to integrate with third-party services. Integrations with services such as voice calls and video chat, EHRs, real-time text-to-speech functionality, and much more help improve continuity of care. 

Create secure access controls into your HIPAA compliant texting app

As mentioned above, the most important thing when developing a HIPAA-compliant texting app is that patient data is protected, so that unauthorized users are not able gain access to confidential information. Health systems must comply with HIPAA regulations to ensure that this data privacy is upheld. 

Using end-to-end encryption for every message running over the network and secure controls,  ensures that user data is fully secure so that you can focus on innovating your product offering instead of worrying about maintaining backend infrastructure. You can build a chat that is able to safely stream or store protected health information using security features like:

• End-to-end message encryption

• Access controls and permission management

• User authentication features  

• Audit controls

Why HIPAA-Compliant Messaging is Needed 

HIPAA refers to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a law established in 1996 to ensure that security is in place to protect patient privacy and sensitive information. 

To establish HIPAA compliance on your platform, you must follow the four HIPAA rules: Privacy, Security, Enforcement, and Breach Notification.

• Privacy: Established to safeguard an individual's protected health information (PHI) and authorize when PHI can be used or disclosed. 

• Security: Describes the physical, technical, and administrative security measures that are needed for securing the confidentiality of electronic protected health information.

• Enforcement: Deals with compliance and enforcing HIPAA.

• Breach Notification: Requirements that involve notifying HIPAA covered entities and their business associates if a security breach occurs.

Healthcare organizations are required to protect patient information through encryption and advanced password security, and any failure to follow these security rules and HIPAA regulations can result in fines depending on the violation.

Best Practices for HIPAA-Compliant Texting Apps

When it comes to ensuring HIPAA-compliance in your in-app chat, there are certain safeguards that need to be in place—from the way messages are sent in transit to security measures that must be implemented. For applications to be HIPAA-compliant from a technical standpoint, they must include: 

• Encryption: Secure messaging, which is also known as message encryption, is required to protect messages and data containing PHI. Many applications rely on Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is an updated version of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a common security protocol used to establish secure communication. With this, the contents of a message are unreadable to those without access permissions. For example, messages and data in transit are encrypted as it travels to the intended recipient. Once enabled, only the sender and the authorized recipients can read the message. 

• Password Protection: Safeguarding your telehealth application with access controls and user authentication is essential. Access controls allow you to manage read/write permissions for specific users, with the ability to grant permissions for who can access PHI. This can be done by enabling secure password protected logins and two-factor authentication to add an extra layer of security to your messaging platform. 

• Audit Controls: Audit controls allow you to monitor user access and see activity logs. For instance, say an individual who is a part of the healthcare staff, like a nurse, logs in to access patient data. There will be a record of their actions in the system, and you’ll also have the ability to see who, when, and how long they were in the system. This is crucial for ensuring that healthcare information doesn’t fall into the hands of unauthorized parties. 

• Automatic Sign-Out Features: In order to protect patient data, automatic sign-out features are implemented to detect inactive users. Using a timed log-off functionality, you can prevent unauthorized third-parties from accessing confidential information if a device with PHI is left unattended. 

• Business Associate Agreement (BAA): A Business Associate Agreement covers the entity (the organization who is delivering the product) and the technology and services (the business associate) that you choose to store, transmit, or process PHI. This agreement outlines how both parties are practicing compliance. 

By meeting these security requirements in your HIPAA-compliant messaging app , you guarantee that patient privacy is upheld on your software application, which allows healthcare professionals to truly focus on delivering better patient care.  

If you’re looking to provide high-quality remote care with HIPAA-compliant texting and in-app messaging, try PubNub’s interactive and live-code tour.