“Dominance of “patient privacy” as the main topic in healthcare has had significant implications on patient outcomes and healthcare costs. It has also hindered patient engagement and compliance. Patients are going out of their way, waving their privacy rights and taking their health in their own hands. And innovative technologies are facilitating this trend. But this pattern will not last long as long as we keep the focus on the topic. This has continuously led to new layers of restrictions, making it even more difficult to innovate and create the much needed transparency and efficiency in the industry.
We need to change the conversation in healthcare from “Privacy” to “Transparency.” They are not mutually exclusive, but the discussion must change to patient-centered health to create transparency across providers while taking all measures to protect patient privacy and ensure data security. Today, the conversation in healthcare remains focused on “Privacy” as the key topic and we keep over engineering it, leaving the burden of transparency and data sharing on the patients. We need a paradigm shift in healthcare.
Trayt is founded on this new paradigm. We started with “Transparency”, “patient-centered outcomes” and “collaboration” – we then created a privacy structure around that. What did we see? An overwhelming response from clinians to use a personalized, real-time, multi-user outcomes platform that engages the entire system of care, most importantly the patients. We separated this discussion from EMRs or administrative tools, but integrated with other outcomes platforms that provided everyone around the table all the data they needed to make the best clinical decisions.”
“When my son started exhibiting symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism I realized just how difficult it was to have my son’s doctors, therapists, and teachers all communicate together about what they observed, how they were each treating my son, and how my son was doing. The doctor we would see once every three months, therapist was weekly, and school was of course daily. I wanted to be able to correctly communicate the events, such as tantrums, that were happening at school to the physician. Privacy laws would inhibit the transparency needed for teachers and school staff to share information about my son with his clinicians. Because of the privacy laws this information could only be shared with me as a parent and then the burden was on me to share it with everyone and make sense of all the information. I came up with a google spreadsheet where the teachers would mark the circumstance and environment of every tantrum event. As a parent I would take notes about his sleep, eating patterns, and bowel movements and then share it with everyone. This would then help the therapists and doctors to treat him with all this information in mind. This is part of what Trayt is addressing today.”
“At Trayt we understand the importance of protecting patient health data and have built security measures in to the system from the ground up. We’ve looked at the industry best practices when it comes to security and privacy and have controls in place for a Hi Trust standard. We want to maintain a fine balance between transparency and privacy, ensuring that all the data is secure but that the caretakers and providers are able to have access to it with patient/parent consent at the get go.”
“We are following HiTrust guidelines, procedurally and technologically to ensure compliance. This is however an infrastructural and cost burden especially on a small technology company like Trayt or even on a small independent clinic in managing the procedural and IT requirements.”
“I recently joined Trayt as a software engineer with a primary focus to implement and manage all the privacy and data security features and infrastructure needed to meet Hi Trust requirements. My focus has been to implement and maintain several key measures to ensure patient privacy and data security. We have implemented strict password policies so users are encouraged to create dependable, secure passwords and we then store and utilize them properly, following Hi Trust guidelines.
Clinicians who will be accessing patient data through our physician portal have even stricter password guidelines that would require them to frequently change their passwords. They are also only able to access their account in specified ip ranges to minimize any possibility of unauthorized access. Trayt takes patient privacy and data security very seriously.”
Jae Jin Lee, a Special Education Teacher and a Parent Educator in the public and non-public schools in the Bay Area shares her thoughts on the value of such collaboration and transparency.
Jae Jin works with children on the Autism Spectrum Disorder, debatably one of the most difficult conditions to manage without this type of collaboration and transparency between caretakers.