Trusttone

Dr. Jane Smith runs her solo psychiartry practice with efficient but small support staff. Other than essential email communication with her patients by the staff, she sees a great value in using email as a channel for conselling her patients. The medium allows very efficient communication with ability to communicate to mutliple patients simulataneously. It also offers patients a quick response. They do not have to wait until their next appointment for the issues that can be resolved by email.

One problem however, is that the emails would contain sensitive patient health information that should not be readable by others. Not only such privacy desired by the patient, it is required for compliance with the HIPAA regulations.

Dr. Smith installed TrustTone Stealth for Outlook 2007 and activated her email account for encryption. This gave her ability to encrypt an email by a single-click of the mouse. For ad hoc encryption with her patients, she uses the drop-down menu and selects 'Encrypted' mode for the email she is about to send out. She has setup policy rules to send encrypted emails to business partners, labs and insurance companies, so that she does not have to even think about it. This allows her to safe guard her patients health related private information and also be in compliance with HIPAA regulations. Recipients of her encrypted emails like the fact that they do not need to download or install any software and can view and reply using just the Web browser using a familiar paradigm.

Net result is win-win for Dr. Smith and her patients. She can take care of a lot of ad hoc activities at the speed of electrons and her patients get a blazing fast response for their questions and concerns.