Christopher Maiona, MD, chief medical officer at PatientKeeper, discusses with Medical Economics the technology challenges of making necessary information quickly available to healthcare professionals while maintaining HIPAA compliance and how technology can be improved.

Certainly there are a number of technologies that are making it quick and easy for health care IT personnel to authenticate users. Data biometrics have made logging into apps quick and easy.

Single source login within an app has made access to data significantly easier. Consider a physician in an EHR and they need to view a chest X-ray. Well, with single-source login, the EHR can pass along my credentials to the system and bring that image over. There’s no need for me to sign out and then sign into a separate system or sign in every time I need to see my documents.

Certainly the ability to maintain audit logs is very useful, I think in providing some education to providers, because sometimes we do go astray and don’t realize that we committed a breach. I would say though that the real key to adoption and compliance here is simplicity. Make tools that are easy to use, then incorporate them into the physician’s process and workflow—those are the ones that tend to be utilized.

Read more in Medical Economics.