Encrypted Email

AccessPlug™ secure encrypted email provides another dimension to doctor—patient relation.

AccessPlug™ email accounts are hosted on Microsoft Exchange 2007 server that provides encrypted email functionality. Communication with the email server will be encrypted using web or email client. We provide MS outlook 2007 to our users for free.

Effective communication between doctor and patient has always been of critical importance in the doctor-patient relationship.  As communications technology has developed in the modern age, the information exchange between doctor and patient has also been enhanced in convenience, security, and privacy.  Studies have shown that the convenience of email greatly enhances the communication experience of the patient in the doctor-patient relationship by reducing the time necessary to devote to contacting their physician.

With over 75% of Americans regularly accessing the Internet and email as the most popular online activity, email has become a normal and accepted way to communicate.  Email has emerged as the preferred method for Americans to communicate – more than telephone or conventional mail.  Patients would much rather email their doctor a question than call into the office when their doctor may not be available to answer questions.  Communicating through email presents a communication method that is convenient for both the doctor and the patient with the experience being enhanced for all parties involved. 

Also, many patients expressed frustration with contacting physician’s offices by the telephone and specific frustration with extended periods of time spent on hold or “playing phone tag” with the physician.  It would seem that with all the positive experiences patients had with emailing their physicians, that doctors could lose patients should they choose not to implement email communications when their colleagues do offer the service. 

Among offices that do currently use email to communicate between doctor and patient, the primary email subject is prescription refills followed by non-emergency medical advice and the communication of laboratory test results.  By communicating these most popular patient information requests through email, the number of telephone inquiries to the office is greatly reduced.  For physicians, email enables doctors to communicate with their patients between office visits to ensure that compliance with medical treatment is followed and enhances record keeping by providing an instant digitized record of the communications. 

Patients are learning of the availability of email service more and more and studies have found that once they become aware that email communications are offered and they take advantage of the service that they greatly appreciate the enhanced convenience of email.  While doctor-patient email communication is not currently dominant in the healthcare industry, very soon  it will be and the doctors not grasping onto this service as it takes hold will be left behind as it becomes an industry standard. 

Email Security:

The reasoning behind this largely has to do with the need for secure methods of email communication so that it is guaranteed that only the intended recipient would receive the sensitive health information in accordance to HIPAA laws.  Stories relating the horrors of intercepted emails and the sensitive information stolen from them pervaded the public consciousness in the past and many simply refused to communicate sensitive health data because of this.  Also, secure communication in the health care industry is guaranteed by HIPAA laws so there must be a guarantee that emails will not be intercepted.  The need to communicate securely has pushed development of secure email technologies including email encryption. 

With the emergence of email as the most popular method of communication, the American Medical Association was prompted into action to by establishing the “Guidelines for Physician-Patient Electronic Communications” in June of 2000.  These guidelines are readily available on the Internet at http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/2386.html.  These guidelines give the physician simple guidelines to go by when using email to communicate healthcare information for the first time.  However, the guidelines do not relate the necessary technology required to ensure email communication is compliant with HIPAA regulations.  When communicating with patients through email, doctors must be able to ensure that they are communicating securely.

Encryption:

The technology used in secure email communications involves encryption.  Emails can readily be intercepted by those knowing how over the standard POP3 protocol used in low end email hosting applications or free email services like Yahoo, MSN, Verizon, etc.  Email must be encrypted both on the mail server and on the email client.  Mail servers using Microsoft Exchange 2007 have this ability to provide secure, encrypted email.  Doctors need to make sure that wherever their email is hosted that their accounts are using secure platforms.  Physicians are able to use encrypted email by adjusting a few properties in their MS exchange based email accounts, whether using email applications like Outlook and Thunderbird or using web mail. These properties must be adjusted on both the incoming mail servers and the outgoing email servers which are commonly under the IMAP or SMTP protocols.  By adjusting these properties, email is then communicated over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), providing a level of encryption that is  impossible to decrypt if the message were intercepted.  Email encryption ensures that even if an email message were intercepted, it would be illegible because only the sender and the recipient possess the encryption keys, provided by SSL, to decode the message.  Securing email in this method is compliant with HIPAA regulations.