Secure Messaging
KIMS Hospital plans ahead with Secure Messaging
The largest independent hospital in Kent, KIMS Hospital, has been using the Secure Messaging service for the past eight years. Business Finance Manager, Neil Brown, explains why it’s critical to delivering a high-quality service for patients.
What they needed
Effective and secure information sharing with external parties is essential for any organisation but particularly for a private hospital like KIMS Hospital.
“Seamless communication with insurers is key to our PMI patient pathways,” explains Neil. “We signed up for Healthcode’s Secure Messaging service when we opened in 2014 and it has enabled us to significantly improve our processes over the last eight years.”
We’d absolutely recommend the Secure Messaging service to other hospitals. We wouldn’t be able to do our jobs effectively without it.
Why Healthcode?
Secure Messaging is an encrypted email service which Healthcode developed exclusively for the private healthcare sector. It means KIMS Hospital can exchange sensitive health and financial information with their contacts and meet their data protection obligations.
Key features
Secure Messaging has full end-to-end encryption to protect confidential information sent to practitioners, clinics, hospitals and insurers.
Users can quickly search for the correct recipient on Healthcode’s Global Directory of more than 2,500 individuals and group mailboxes and set up their own personal list of frequent contacts. It’s also possible to personalise message settings and download document templates for standard requests.
Managing incoming mail is easy too, from setting up notification emails for new messages to creating mailbox folders.
Impact on their business
Neil and his team primarily use Secure Messaging to apply for pre-authorisation from insurers and resolve policy queries. This frees up time and increases data accuracy so KIMS Hospital can better plan patient care episodes.
“We use Secure Messaging every day to obtain pre-authorisation from insurers and we are currently working about three weeks in advance,” he says. “That’s amazing and of course it’s absolutely in the best interests of our patients to know that everything is in place before they attend for their treatment.”
From our perspective, the service is easy to use – just like regular email – and meets our data protection obligations. We don’t have to worry about recipients being able to open the encrypted messages we send through the system and we are notified when we receive their response so we can act on it straight away.