As the country embraces social distancing to help fight the spread of COVID-19, the United States is finding ways for the Healthcare industry to help fight the virus while reducing the risk to our healthcare professionals.
As some of you may have heard, on March 17th, 2020, the United States made an announcement that they would not be imposing penalties in regards to HIPAA Rules as it pertains to telehealth services during the COVID-19 emergency.
As stated on HHS.gov, “OCR will exercise its enforcement discretion and will not impose penalties for noncompliance with the regulatory requirements under the HIPAA Rules against covered health care providers in connection with the good faith provision of telehealth during the COVID-19 nationwide public health emergency. This notification is effective immediately.”
For more information on this update, please read the Notification Enforcement Discretion Telehealth page on the HHS.gov website.
How does this affect you?
This allows covered healthcare providers to use common video apps such as Apple FaceTime, Facebook Messenger video chat, Google Hangouts, or Skype to provide telehealth services to patients at a distance. The use of these apps is not only for conditions related to COVID-19, but healthcare providers can use these apps to help with any medical condition.
How can Scorpion help you?
If you’re a Scorpion client and you have chosen a video service for your telehealth services and you want to connect with your patients over these apps, please let Scorpion know which service you have signed up for so we can announce this on your website to your visitors.
If you have any questions about this, please reach out to your account team using your client-specific distro. Our team will be happy to help you.
Or, if you are not already working with Scorpion and you want to know more about how we help healthcare providers with their websites, don’t hesitate to contact us.
