Ever wondered what happens to your patient’s data after it leaves your system?
If you’re investing in state-of-the-art clinical software, medical hardware, and even cybersecurity training for your staff but not using secure messaging systems, there’s an invisible weak spot in your operations.
The stakes for healthcare data security have never been higher. Just ask Medibank, whose 2022 breach exposed 9.7 million customers’ data and is expected to cost them over $125 million. Ouch.
Thousands of referrals, test results and clinical notes zip between practices across Australia every day. The question is: are yours taking the vulnerable scenic route or travelling via the security highway?
Your patient data might be more vulnerable than you think
Remember passing notes in school? That’s essentially what happens when you send or receive a referral via email or fax, except that note contains sensitive information valuable to cybercriminals.
Healthcare is the sector most targeted by cybercriminals in Australia and New Zealand. Non-hospital clinical providers face almost ten times more publicly claimed attacks than hospitals, largely because smaller practices have valuable data but fewer security resources.
Here’s what happens when you send or receive patient information using traditional methods:
- Email: Your potentially unencrypted message bounces between multiple servers; each is a potential access point for attackers.
- Fax: These are often converted to emails, sit in unsecured queues and can be viewed by anyone walking past the machine.
These decades-old technologies were created long before healthcare cyberattacks became a billion-dollar criminal industry.
If you’re upgrading to a practice management software (PMS) while still using fax and email to share sensitive information, you’re essentially installing a state-of-the-art security system at the front door while leaving the back window wide open.
The evolution of healthcare communications
While many industries still rely on fax and email, healthcare has developed specialised secure messaging tech that addresses its unique needs.
Think of secure messaging as a private courier service built for sensitive information. It creates a direct, encrypted connection between verified users that confirms both sender and recipient. Your referrals, results and clinical notes travel through a single protected channel.
Three key standards in Australia work together to protect patient data and ensure tech systems can understand each other:
- Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) ensures documents like referrals and discharge summaries maintain their format and meaning when shared between different systems.
- Health Level 7 version 2 (HL7 v2) enables real-time messaging between different healthcare systems for patient admissions, test results, and more.
- Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) allows modern healthcare app and systems to easily share specific patient information rather than entire documents.
The most comprehensive healthcare secure messaging solutions comply with all three of these standards. Only three providers in Australia do.
We’re proud to be one of them – it’s confirmation our secure messaging tech offers maximum compatibility and protection.
Goodbye fax machine, hello secure messaging
Picture this: Dr. Lee needs to refer a patient to a specialist. Instead of printing or faxing the referral, she clicks ‘send’ in her existing PMS.
Behind the scenes, a secure messaging service like ReferralNet encrypts that referral and delivers it directly into the specialist’s PMS. The specialist opens the referral and finds the patient details automatically populated – no manual data entry, no scanning, no paper.
Thousands of Australian healthcare providers have already made this switch, paying as little as $15 per month to cover their essential communication needs. As practices grow, plans scale to match their communication volume. With ReferralNet, each document counts as a single message regardless of length.
Many practices are hesitant to use new tech, but when secure messaging costs less than Netflix and saves thousands in potential breach costs and countless admin hours, the question becomes: why take the risk?
How you share patient information might be the most vulnerable point in your practice’s security. With cyberattacks rising year on year, the choice between continuing with outdated methods or switching to secure messaging has never presented a clearer risk-benefit calculation.
Find out how much you could save with our ReferralNet Secure Messaging Savings Calculator – you might be surprised.