5 Ways That DocuSign Can Help Health Care Providers

DocuSign, the San Francisco-based company that leverages more than a decade of experience to assist clients with their e-signature and document maintenance needs, is well positioned to work with professionals in the health care industry.

Through DocuSign, physicians and other medical professionals can spend less time filling out paperwork and more time improving patients’ quality of life. Obtaining signatures and filling out forms, as well as storing, retrieving, and accessing information, is much easier and more streamlined with DocuSign’s full-service Digital Transaction Management platform. DocuSign also helps its clients to achieve HIPAA compliance.

Here is a summary of how and why DocuSign has proven itself as an industry leader in providing services to some of the world’s best-known health care organizations. Among the businesses that have incorporated the DocuSign platform into their daily conduct of business are New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the pharmaceutical giants Novartis and AstraZeneca.

1. Increase office productivity

When health care providers work with DocuSign, they will find that office productivity stands to make substantial gains. The company’s platform helps to reduce the number of times that staff members need to re-key the same information, thus reducing the number of errors in patient records. Additionally, it helps to cut down on time spent on billing procedures and communications with insurance companies. Through DocuSign, providers can lower their non-health care expenses, such as records maintenance, storage, and retrieval.

2. Assistance with patient intake

DocuSign can assist medical providers with procedures that include patient intake, the signing of consent forms, contracts with suppliers, the handling of insurance-related claims, and many other day-to-day matters.

3. Elevate the patient experience

DocuSign allows patients to fill out and sign the necessary paperwork ahead of their scheduled visits, on their own time, and through the mobile devices of their choice. This allows them and their doctors to use office visits to focus on communication and care.

4. Raise the integrity of data

DocuSign enables providers to increase the integrity of their data and to guarantee the authenticity of signatures on medical documents. The company’s e-signature features are compliant with relevant federal regulations dealing with identity verification and authenticity. DocuSign is a leader in its industry in terms of its ability to ensure such verification, and it uses up-to-the-minute methods such as SMS authentication, biometric markers, and knowledge-based question-and-answer verification.

5. Boost HIPAA compliance

Perhaps most important of all, compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Affordable Care Act, and federal loss-ratio rules become significantly easier with the help of DocuSign. On its website, the company offers prospective clients a thorough overview of how its products and services enhance compliance with regard to the handling of patient information in a digital environment.

HIPAA, which was passed by Congress in 1996, requires compliance in maintaining patient privacy as it relates to paper documents and digital files. HIPAA serves as the national regulatory standard for the handling of sensitive personal medical information, whether by individual doctors’ offices, insurers, hospitals, or other agencies involved in the delivery of health care services or payment for such services.

Sensitive information includes demographics, personal medical histories, the results of laboratory tests and other examinations, and information about health insurance.

Any entity that deals with such information must maintain security in the handling of physical records, as well as in the processing, storage, and retrieval of digitized information. In addition, any company that acts as a subcontractor to an agency that handles this type of information must maintain an equal level of compliance.

In both its ancient and modern forms, the Hippocratic Oath specifically forbids health care providers from discussing a patient’s personal affairs publicly. In today’s increasingly digitized and networked health care industry, the provisions of HIPAA that protect individual privacy have become critically important. Physicians’ offices, radiologists, laboratories, and other providers typically file orders and maintain records electronically. While these methods have increased efficiency exponentially, they present challenges in meeting the provisions of the Hippocratic Oath.

HIPAA standards, as interpreted by the Department of Health and Human Services,

feature a privacy rule and a security rule. The relevant privacy rule states that any individually identifiable health-related information must be safeguarded in ways that fully meet applicable standards. The security rule makes the privacy rule operational by focusing on measures, both technical and non-technical, that agencies must abide by when handling sensitive, personally identifiable information.

Among other requirements, HIPAA enjoins medical providers to abide by appropriate restrictions on the distribution, removal, and use of personally identifiable health information. Restrictions also dictate who within an organization may access such sensitive information.

DocuSign’s Digital Transaction Management platform has helped numerous medical clients to comply with all of these regulations while continuing to operate with speed and efficiency. DocuSign offers full encryption of documents according to the protocols of the International Organization for Standardization.