Avoid These Teletherapy Mistakes To Stay HIPAA Compliant

Making a mistake during a teletherapy session can come with immense penalties along with criminal liability. Knowing what common mistakes occur and how to avoid them is essential for any healthcare provider.  

 

Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) is any electronic content (text, audio, image, or video) that contains patient health information. As we all know, this responsibility ultimately falls on the healthcare provider to make sure ePHI is only shared and stored in a secure HIPAA compliant format.  

 

So, let’s review common teletherapy mistakes providers make during a teletherapy visit and how to avoid them: 

This is hands down the most important step you can take to ensure your teletherapy session is going to be HIPAA compliant: choose the right platform. You want to make sure your teletherapy software maintains HIPAA compliant safeguards like:  

 

There are several broad telemedicine hosting providers on the market today that could work but if you specifically want teletherapy software that is speech, physical, and occupational teletherapy-focused then we highly recommend looking into Ambiki’s HIPAA compliant teletherapy platform. 

During a session, it is not uncommon for the healthcare provider to want to share a website, resource, or on-screen activity with a patient. Be sure to use a teletherapy platform that clearly notifies the provider of what exact regions of the screen will be shared.   

 

In pediatric therapy sessions, the healthcare provider will often share an on-screen activity with the child. Unfortunately, most providers do this by either giving up control of their screen (risking unwanted off-page clicks) during the activity or hoping the child is clicking and pointing where they are supposed to be. As you can imagine, this leads to miscommunication and poor engagement during the session. 

Thankfully, Ambiki’s exclusive Click Beacon™ feature allows you to visually see where on the screen the patient clicks when you are sharing your screen or a resource - without actually granting the patient remote access to your computer. This means no unwanted off-page clicks or accidental HIPAA violations. Yes, win! 

Anyone who works in pediatrics knows that our patients and their home environments can be unpredictable. At the drop of a hat, unforeseen circumstances can come up that may violate the privacy of the patient or their caregivers during a teletherapy session. Plus, add in the complexities of group therapy sessions in the pediatric population, and providers can quickly lose control of their teletherapy session leading to inappropriate circumstances, or worse yet, a HIPPA violation.   

Luckily, Ambiki thought this problem through! Ambiki starts all group teletherapy sessions using our exclusive Safe Oasis™ feature which de-identifies participants from one another to maintain HIPAA compliance. We also created Ambiki's Emergency Brake feature that gives the therapist an easy way to temporarily pause the audio and video of a therapy participant with just a click. 

Healthcare providers are responsible for maintaining HIPAA compliance in every teletherapy session. We can do this best by being aware of the platform we are using, the information we are sharing, and the patient environments we are controlling in each and every session. 

 

Interested in learning more about Ambiki’s Teletherapy Platform? Visit us at Ambiki.com