Using mobile healthcare applications like HIPAA messaging is a large part of what is largely considered Health 2.0, which includes utilizing mobile healthcare apps and other tools like medical text messaging to help gather and disseminate data related to patient records between those patients and their health care providers and insurers. An estimated 551 medical software companies that are certified are in existence today in the United States, and they sell about 1,137 software programs to providers. To keep all this data easily communicated without affecting HIPAA laws and regulations, these providers have begun offering stronger database visualization solutions that include healthcare mobile apps and HIPAA messaging services.
This has occurred mostly because of a dire need but also because President Barack Obama signed into law the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (Hitech Act) in February 2009, which offers $27 billion in incentives for providers to switch over to using digital health records. So in other words, medical providers and insurance carriers are getting incentives to use HIPAA messaging and other solutions to disseminate information. HIPAA is a broad based protocol that relies upon protecting information, and so these providers have employed the HIPAA messaging that are certified to protect this information. HIPAA’s privacy rule details protected health information, or PHI, that is held by all sorts of entities from healthcare clearinghouses to health plans sponsored by employers to health insurers, and its Title 1 protects insurance coverage for employees and families if they change jobs.
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