How to use your smartphone for telehealth

[MaxPC]

Good to know.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6144316180001#sp=show-clips

[Ken]

Here is how my wife's organization is doing it. They have had this up and running for a couple of years now. They are now doing virtual care visits for everything not classified as urgent care or ER. but then Kaiser has invested millions of dollars into getting this system up and running. It was not quick or easy: https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/car ... hone-visit

Some of the complications are: (1) designing a secure portal to preserve doctor/patient confidentiality and secure medical records, (2) allowing providers to access patient medical records securely during virtual consults, (3) integrating things like prescription refills through the virtual portal.

My wife does virtual consults with patients all time time from home now. They use a special encrypted VPN and she has a special encryption dongle that she has to plug into her employee laptop to even get into the system to prevent outside hacking of medical records and prescription informatino. She can't access the system any other way. The doctor's portal is also extremely sophisticated. She can scroll through the patient's entire medical record while online with the patent and also has access to appointment scheduling, prescription refills, referrals, and all that sort of thing. Kaiser spent a ton of money building and testing this system. It's not something ordinary clinics are going to be able to get up and running on the fly through skype or zoom or anything like that.

[video][/video]

[Josh]

My PCP's office already had an online health portal (provided by "Athena Health") where I can see test results and so on.

My sister in law is a practitioner, and she switched to "seeing" patients virtually via phone calls or a Zoom / WebEx type of meeting. The IT staff for the various provider organisations she works for made sure some kind of VPN, Citrix, etc. is available for her to plug into.

Most providers have had electronic records and charting for a while now (the quality and cost of those implementations is a topic worthy of a separate discussion). As far as cybersecurity goes, in my experience, hospitals and providers have been a bit lax in this area. I would expect to see it gradually come up to levels similar to the banking industry.

FYI, an encryption dongle is a bit obsolete at this point (this was state of the art 5 - 10 years ago though, when Kaiser probably designed all of this), but I'm sure Kaiser's experts and vendors will continue to update their cybersecurity infrastructure. Generally speaking, Kaiser has been on the forefront of technology advances.

[Ken]

Yeah, I 'm not exactly sure how it works because I haven't paid that much attention. The dongle has a LDC display that produces a 1-time code that she enters into a password field when logging in and she can only use a Kaiser-provided laptop that is completely locked-down in terms of administrative privileges.

But they are extremely cautious about cybersecurity. Not just for medical records, but perhaps even more so for the pharma records as they don't want people hacking online prescriptions to opioids.

My PCP's office already had an online health portal (provided by "Athena Health") where I can see test results and so on.

My sister in law is a practitioner, and she switched to "seeing" patients virtually via phone calls or a Zoom / WebEx type of meeting. The IT staff for the various provider organisations she works for made sure some kind of VPN, Citrix, etc. is available for her to plug into.

Most providers have had electronic records and charting for a while now (the quality and cost of those implementations is a topic worthy of a separate discussion). As far as cybersecurity goes, in my experience, hospitals and providers have been a bit lax in this area. I would expect to see it gradually come up to levels similar to the banking industry.

FYI, an encryption dongle is a bit obsolete at this point (this was state of the art 5 - 10 years ago though, when Kaiser probably designed all of this), but I'm sure Kaiser's experts and vendors will continue to update their cybersecurity infrastructure. Generally speaking, Kaiser has been on the forefront of technology advances.

[Josh]

But they are extremely cautious about cybersecurity. Not just for medical records, but perhaps even more so for the pharma records as they don't want people hacking online prescriptions to opioids.

Generally speaking, that's not why medical providers are cautious about cybersecurity; the biggest cybersecurity risk providers face is more pedestrian stuff like ransomware attacks. Such an attack makes it difficult or impossible for providers to provide care, which is the most critical concern for a provider. Second to that are attacks that could cause large financial losses, but these are the same kind of concerns any industry faces that processes a large amount of accounts payable and accounts receiveable activity. Surprisingly, HIPAA and privacy is not much of a concern, mostly because HIPAA doesn't hold providers at fault for cybersecurity breaches; the fault lies with the actual criminal engaging in the breach. (HIPAA is not structured at all like other cybersecurity regulations like PCI or NERC-CIP.)

Hacking online prescriptions for opioids is something I've never heard come up once as a cybersecurity concern with medical providers.

[Ken]

But they are extremely cautious about cybersecurity. Not just for medical records, but perhaps even more so for the pharma records as they don't want people hacking online prescriptions to opioids.

Generally speaking, that's not why medical providers are cautious about cybersecurity; the biggest cybersecurity risk providers face is more pedestrian stuff like ransomware attacks. Such an attack makes it difficult or impossible for providers to provide care, which is the most critical concern for a provider. Second to that are attacks that could cause large financial losses, but these are the same kind of concerns any industry faces that processes a large amount of accounts payable and accounts receiveable activity. Surprisingly, HIPAA and privacy is not much of a concern, mostly because HIPAA doesn't hold providers at fault for cybersecurity breaches; the fault lies with the actual criminal engaging in the breach. (HIPAA is not structured at all like other cybersecurity regulations like PCI or NERC-CIP.)

Hacking online prescriptions for opioids is something I've never heard come up once as a cybersecurity concern with medical providers.

I'm sure you would know. Those were just my wife's guesses as to why the high security.