4 Ways to Keep Healthcare Data Protected in Market Research Transcriptions
Transcripts play a pretty significant role in market research, and the healthcare market research industry is just one of the very many sectors that greatly benefit from having professional services transcribe interviews for research. Healthcare, medical, or pharma research entails interviewing patients as well as professionals in the field. The topics demand both time and expertise, and ultimately, getting accurate documentation of these interviews is crucial for reliable insights discovery.
This also means that professional market research transcription services often receive sensitive healthcare data from researchers. And to protect this kind of data, specifically in the US, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was implemented.
At TranscriptionWing, we acknowledge the importance of protecting not only healthcare but all sensitive data of our clients and partners. We have implemented several guidelines that are strictly followed to the dot to prevent any kind of unauthorized access.
Guidelines to help keep the privacy of your market research transcriptions:
1. Keeping things in-house
An extremely common instance where data breaches happen is when someone with access to sensitive data decides to make that data partially publicly available; that is, by outsourcing some of the work involving that data to a third party. While that does have some advantages, mostly in speeding up the process dramatically, it can backfire as well. It can increase the risk of a breach through the exposure of your data to more parties. This can obviously lead to a number of dire consequences, those that can jeopardize your study and your participants.
As a solution, you should keep things in-house. Keeping things in-house would mean utilizing a transcriber from your own organization or hiring a transcription company with dedicated teams of transcribers and editors.
TranscriptionWing subscribes to a strict culture of confidentiality. Every member of our team ensures that your data is safeguarded throughout the whole transcription process. No third party is also ever given access to your information without your specific consent. The only people who will have access to your data will be the assigned transcribers and editors. Best of all is that they have all signed non-disclosure agreements and will fulfill your requests in-house.
2. Top-of-the-line security measures
Security measures are not only significant but absolutely necessary. Here in TranscriptionWing, workstations of transcriptionists and editors are all encrypted and secured with limited logins and passwords. All users are also denied read and write access to removable USB storage devices. This prevents the copying of data as well as its transit through unauthorized means. A secured network is also required when accessing the Internet. VPN (virtual private network) is used to ensure even more security.
Our platform itself is secured against external access. It is not only password-protected but is also compartmentalized so that transcribers are only able to see the files they are assigned to work on at any given point in time. It's also important to note that only select personnel have access to files from a client.
3. Geo-fencing
We also employ geo-fencing which limits the processing of data to people within a certain geographical location. This also has the added benefit of giving certain jobs to people with know-how about that specific location that may be unfamiliar to outsiders or non-natives.
4. HIPAA compliance
Under Title II of HIPAA, all business associates of entities covered under HIPAA are obligated to follow its regulations when it comes to the handling of protected health information (PHI). That means that all medical transcriptionists, whether they work for a transcription service or not, are obligated by HIPAA and are required to adhere to its regulations regarding the handling of PHI. Naturally, we also adhere to HIPAA and are thus strictly prohibited from using PHI in any way that can violate Title II. Using chain-of-trust agreements, we adhere to the protection of PHI during transmission from one party to another.
At the end of the day, TranscriptionWing understands the importance of keeping the privacy of your transcriptions, not just for your market research and healthcare data, but for every other kind of data as well. Rest assured, you can expect our team of professionals to safeguard your data and treat it with the utmost respect. These several guidelines are implemented every single day, in every transcription we create.
