HIPAA Compliant Dictation Software

With HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, in effect, medical dictators and transcriptionists have to be wary with the use or exchange of patients' Protected Health Information (PHI) in their dictation transmissions. As a medical transcriptionist (MT), they have to maintain the privacy of every patient record being transcribed.

To protect patient confidentiality, it is recommended that your computer comes with at least the following:

• Firewall protection with solid password protection for user accounts
• Regular Windows or MAC updates for computer security
• Up-to-date antivirus software
• File encryption software (e.g., Dial Dictate, Web Dictate, or Express Dictate)

The recent stimulus plan (or American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) included a specific act — called the HITECH Act (or the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) which has specific requirements for the electronic transmission of patients' health information. For this reason, NCH Software has created a medical user version for its dictation software applications which integrate seemlessly with Express Scribe on the transcription side to maintain patient privacy through the transcription process.

Dial Dictate: HIPAA-compliant encryption to secure medical patient data when recording as .dct files.
Express Dictate: Supports HIPAA-compliant encryption, perfect to secure patient or client data for transmission over the Internet.
Web Dictate: Recording can be HIPAA-compliant encrypted for privacy and security.

Given that medical transcriptionists receive, send, and store confidential patient data, it's vital they recognize and adhere to HIPAA rules on privacy, security, and confidentiality. If this is accomplished, patient records are secured, data efficiency is obtained, and more importantly customer confidence is increased.

HIPAA offers a set of strict guidelines for protecting patients' privacy and information. Seeing as a lot of health organizations utilize NCH Software for dictating and transcribing medical records, we have carefully considered the best way to sustain these guidelines. MTs can rest assured that NCH Software will assist them in paving the way to a HIPAA-compliant future.

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Express Dictate Software helps a Medical Practice Find More Time for Patients

You’ve got to love it when someone calls what you’re offering “a revelation.”

Those are the words of Dr. Sam Rodgers, general practitioner at the London-based Marven Medical Center, which treats 5,000 patients.

On an average day, each physician at Marven Medical dictates between 8 and 12 letters using Express Dictate to make their recordings at a computer set up with a microphone. Combined, that makes for a lot of letters that need to be sent out.

“Express dictate has been a revelation,” Dr. Rodgers said. “We used to use tapes and dictaphones to record our letters. We now dictate the letters on to our desktop machines as we see the patient.”

Rodgers and his staff have found that in working with digital audio they have had improved audio quality, reducing the number of questions from the administrative staff about what the doctor was saying. They also love the backup feature, because they can recover recordings if there are any queries after the letter has been typed and sent. And the office’s workflow is much more efficient, as the letters are typed as soon as they are sent to the typist—no waiting for a tape to be filled with dictation before being given to the receptionist.

And those are just a few of the benefits to using Express Dictate Dictation Software. The software also allows for assigning priority to dictations, keeping track of transcription progress and the expected completion times, as well as having HIPAA compliant encryption capabilities.

If your office or firm is in need of its own “revelation,” give Express Dictate a try. Or take a look at our full range of dictation software to find more ways set up a dictation solution to meet your individual needs; including dictating on the go from your Pocket PC, Palm or iPhone.

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