What Factors Drive the Telecommunications Costs in Healthcare?
When you consider what factors drive the costs in healthcare telecommunications, you can almost divide the blame into two main categories: government regulations and compliance. HIPAA –The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was enacted by the United States Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. Title II of HIPAA, known as the Administrative Simplification (AS) provisions, requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers. This provision also addresses the security and privacy of healthcare data. The standards were meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation’s health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange in the U.S. healthcare system.
However, as with any government mandate, HIPAA has spawned a plethora of data privacy regulations, including a mandate that requires the encryption of all protected health information (PHI) data that is transmitted by any media, anywhere. This adds significant costs to the transmission of any health data. In addition, significant costs are created by the need to comply with governmental regulations for auditing, tracking and reporting on how the PHI is handled by any transmission media.
Another factor driving communications costs are the response escalation schemes designed to manage alarm events and improve patient safety. Unfortunately, alarm events occur frequently and these events can cause alarm fatigue, which continues to be a pervasive problem at most hospitals. Setting up these alarm management schemes is a complex and costly proposition. Each hospital and each care area has a unique set of circumstances, unique vulnerabilities, and variations of common problems.
Many factors must be considered, including patient population and clinical needs, staffing patterns, care models, architectural layout as it relates to physical limitations for effective alarm coverage, communication protocols, policies, and education. All of these factors add significant additional costs.