How to Avoid a Hostage Situation
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We’ve seen an alarming trend over the past year with regard to our doctors’ data. We (and others) have always advised our doctors to stay away from ‘rent-a-site’ services that will build you a website – and then hold your website & all of the content on your site hostage if you ever cancel their (often overpriced) services. We’ve also seen this disturbing practice from services that take down the ‘microsites’ they created for your practice – and the hundreds of associated recommendations your patients have posted online for you. Now, we’re even starting to see vendors holding your actual patient data hostage.
There are a plethora of patient management systems being used by doctors today from Centricity in hospitals, to Eaglesoft in dental practices, to Nextech in surgical offices, and hundreds more in-between. While most of these software suites allow for the easy (and secure) migration of patient data from one application to another, we’ve run into some companies that are attempting to keep doctors’ from accessing their own patients’ data. Essentially, these companies are telling doctors that they can’t export their own patients’ information, meaning your information belongs to the vendor.
The first instances we’ve run into where this happened, vendors were claiming that it’s would be a HIPAA violation to allow access to this information. We found this downright absurd when you take into account that HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act – emphasis on the part about Portability - which was established, in part, to encourage the use of electronic data interchange in healthcare. Once this claim was exposed as being patently false, one vendor began offering to give doctors access to their own patient data – if they agreed to pay thousands of dollars. Which, to us, sounds a lot like yet another clever form of techstortion.
We understand the temptation for some companies to try and hold your online content, online reviews, and patient information hostage. In the Internet & Software space, services advance at a very rapid pace. Because of this, some vendors want to lock you (and the data that is rightfully yours) into their own products so that they don’t need to worry about innovating. Many tech companies and most users-rights groups aren’t a fan of this, and data portability is becoming the standard. So, be careful before you get locked into a product that holds your data hostage and, in return, keeps your practice from taking advantage of the latest technological innovations.
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