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OhMD is a new healthcare app revolutionizing communication in healthcare for free. Until now, conversations between physicians and their teams were relegated to slow and inefficient channels. A telephone call often turned into a voicemail, which often turned into a game of phone tag that would ultimately waste valuable time every day. While texting has been a preferred channel of communication outside of healthcare, HIPAA rules prevent the use of SMS or even encrypted texting apps like Whatsapp in the industry.
The OhMD app gives healthcare professionals a way to communicate protected health information (PHI) over a HIPAA secure texting platform. A physician can use OhMD to send any text message that needs to go over a HIPAA secure channel. It can be used by any healthcare professional to communicate with any other provider, within or outside any organization.
And for those forward-looking practices searching for more efficient ways to communicate with patients, OhMD does that too.
Practices can use the app to proactively reach out to all their patients, a subset of patients, or one patient at a time. Most practices are inundated with patient calls from open to close, so texting allows practices to reach patients in a far more efficient way. So instead of phone tag with patients to reschedule an appointment or to answer a clinical question, it’s a quick text message. Practices see as much as a 30% reduction in call volume and an instant increase in patient engagement as well as patient satisfaction.
The app is designed to protect patient information through the use of bank-grade encryption and centralized account management. All protected health information is securely stored in an encrypted database and no sensitive information is stored on user devices. If a user were to misplace their smartphone, not only is their OhMD account protected by a password and/or pin code, but their account can be disabled remotely.
The value of texting in healthcare stems from its simplicity.
The app was created to address a pervasive problem in healthcare: the inefficiencies around communications. With OhMD, patients can contact doctors and practices more efficiently with a simple, HIPAA secure text message, while also giving doctors a way to securely text with other doctors and colleagues.
The platform was created by healthcare industry veterans for healthcare professionals and is being used across specialties by healthcare professionals of all types. Phone tag, high phone traffic and voicemails are soon to be a thing of the past, and texting in healthcare is the future.
