Managing Electronic Messaging And E-Discovery For Healthcare Providers

By Symantec

As corporate messaging systems grow, enterprises struggle with the complex task of not only finding sufficient storage space, but also ensuring that they can locate relevant messages from within that ever-growing mass. Healthcare providers face these same challenges and more, with their increasing reliance on email and other electronic communication, stringent legal discovery requirements, and patient confidentiality concerns.

Without effective message management, healthcare providers are vulnerable to financial and litigation risks as well as public relations damage. By establishing a comprehensive message management program, they can mitigate these risks as well as reduce storage and administrative costs; classify and tag messages to speed retrieval; and provide a quick, accurate, and less costly response to litigation discovery requests. An effective solution to meet message management, patient confidentiality, and discovery requirements couples a healthcare provider's business processes with high-technology solutions that can substantially reduce a provider's costs and risks.

Healthcare providers are also working to comply with regulatory requirements for document retention and maintenance, as well as new federal rules for fulfilling litigation discovery requests for electronically stored information, including email, instant messages (IM), and shared documents. Failure to comply with these new rules can impair a provider's ability to mount a strong defense in legal proceedings, jeopardize Joint Commission accreditation, damage public relations, reduce revenue, and risk failing to comply with an increasing number of state privacy standards.

One of a series that describes information technology best practices in the healthcare industry, this paper outlines best practices for coping with a healthcare provider's electronic message volume and for meeting litigation requirements under the new rules governing e-discovery.