The developer of a cloud-based content-sharing platform is touting a number of new app partners and compliance with federal privacy regulations as it makes a push into the mHealth market.
Box, based in Palo Alto, Calif., unveiled 10 new app partners and an investment in cloud-based EHR developer drchrono in a flurry of press releases issued on April 25. Company officials also guaranteed compliance with HIPAA and HITECH standards in any business associate agreements (BAA) and launched a promotion through Doximity's online professional network of physicians.
"Hospitals, medical groups and physicians are all facing challenges, including privacy regulations, the migration to electronic health records and outdated IT infrastructure," said Whitney Bouck, the company's general manager of enterprise, in a press release. "Box breaks down walls and helps people collaborate to get work done. These new partner apps and security standards will help where it matters most: managing critical information, coordinating care, and driving productivity industry-wide."
"The consumerization of IT backed by the evolution of the cloud is shaking up the healthcare market," said Charlotte Davies, lead analyst for healthcare life sciences at Ovum, in the press release. "The traditional approach to IT deployment in health systems – roll out, fix, integrate, update, fix – is changing. More and more healthcare enterprises are actively embracing the new capabilities enabled by cloud technologies to accommodate and utilize the fast growth of mobile applications and wirelessly connected devices."
Box, whose healthcare partners include the Henry Ford Health System, Beaumont Health System, HealthTrust Europe, Johns Hopkins HealthCare Solutions, Wake Forest Baptist Health, San Juan Regional Medical Center and Garden City Hospital, reportedly saw an increase of 81 percent in its healthcare business.
The Box platform is designed to enable secure access to medical records from any location, including mobile devices. This would allow healthcare providers to create a cloud-based repository for medical records, share those records among disparate EHR systems, allow physicians to push medical records to their patients and enable collaboration among different providers on a patient's diagnosis.
Specifically, Box officials said, the new capabilities would enable doctors to send secure text messages to each other, issue prescriptions via an app and access EHRs through a smartphone or tablet.
To bolster this platform, Box announced partnerships with drchrono and Umbie DentalCare on clinical documentation applications; TigerText, Doximity, Medigram and PostureScreen Mobile on care coordination applications; iMedViewer, iPaxera and Medi-Copy on interoperability apps and HealthTap on access settings. In addition, Box has made an investment in drchrono through the Box Innovation Network and will be offering 50GB of free cloud file sharing to Doximity members through the end of this year.
The partnership with TigerText, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based developer of secure real-time messaging for more than 1,000 healthcare providers nationwide, will enable Box customers to use the TigerText messaging platform to send and receive files stored on Box's cloud platform.
“CIOs everywhere are seeing employees transfer important and sensitive information to mobile devices, along with the growing trend of bring your own device (BYOD) to work. In addition, the need to not eat up precious bandwidth and storage with large files has led all types of organizations to the cloud,” said Brad Brooks, TigerText's president and co-founder, in a separate press release. “Integrating with Box is an exciting step as it lets us extend the valuable benefits of secure mobile messaging to customers who are (using) the cloud, with peace of mind that their sensitive information is safe regardless of where they access it from. Whether they are coordinating among caregivers, collaborating on research or consulting with patients Tiger Text secures their communications in a compliant and user friendly manner.”
