Federal Discretion for HIPAA and Telehealth Expiring May 11 - Implications for Microsoft Teams
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued four distinct Notifications of Enforcement Discretion between April, 2020 and February 2021, and all Notifications collectively were associated with the COVID-19 public health emergency. These discretions were issued to essentially allow healthcare providers the ability to adapt their care models to unprecedented circumstances during the pandemic. In this quick blog I will discussone of the expiring discretions associated with telehealthand the use of “non-public facing remote communication technologies”, which includes Microsoft Teams. When healthcare providers use virtual healthcare or telemedicine to deliver services, they must ensure that they comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. OCR is tasked with enforcing this application of HIPAA and HITECH to these services that use remote communication technologies, thus, why they issued theinitial notificationdetailing their provision to not impose penalties. When they issued the notice on March 17, 2020 – the accompanyingFAQdid not specify when the notification would expire. That TBD expiration date is now May 11, 2023.
Hackathon Team Builder: A Teams Tab Application
Learn how to automate building teams during a Virtual hackathon using sample app on GitHub. This article provides technical overview of our Hackathon Team Builder project, a Microsoft Teams tab application to be used by hackathon participants to find, join, and create teams.The "Power" Platform in Healthcare: Monitoring Hand Hygiene Adherence
Replacing manual, paper-based processes with custom development has been extremely costly for most healthcare providers, particularly if the target device is a tablet or smartphone. See how the Microsoft Power Platform can rapidly transformation how hand hygiene monitoring is performed in your organization.Skype for Business Online - End of Life - July 31, 2021
TodayMicrosoft announced that Skype for Business Online will be retiring on July 31, 2021. Though we didn’t know the exact date until today, we have been preparing for this for the past yearand are ready to support you however we can as we work together to help you make this transition. We knew this was coming, we have been preparing for this for the past year, now we know the official date. We hope this does not come as a shock to you as MS Teams has taken center stage for Intelligent Communication and Modern Collaboration and Microsoft as an organization is not going to support Skype for Business (SfB) online in the long term. All of our investments and feature enhancements have been in Teams and Teams will continue to receive these investments for the future.Setting Up Bookings for Virtual Visits
Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has received overwhelming demand for early access to the Teams Bookings app to use for Virtual Visits as mentioned in this recent announcement around New capabilities in M365 to empower healthcare officials by Emma Williams, Corporate Vice President, Modern Workplace Transformation. Our product and engineering teams became so busy fulfilling the exceptions that it put the product’s general availability release schedule in extreme jeopardy. Therefore, the Microsoft team made the difficult decision to deny all outstanding exceptions for early access to Bookings in Teams and re-commit to completing the GA release so that all customers in need can benefit as quickly as possible. That being said, we know that many of you need a tele-health or virtual visit solution right now, and we have a solution for you in the meantime.Voice of #HealthcareCloud "Empowering Nurses to Collaborate with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare"
Voices of #HealthcareCloud is a new webinar series hosted by myself and Vasu Sharma. My name is Shelly Avery, I am currently a Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist for Health and Life Sciences. Vasu is a Customer Success Manager for Microsoft 365 for Health and Life Sciences. Our goal of this webinar series is to showcase how Healthcare is seeing positive business and clinical outcomes with cloud technology. We will be bringing new and creative solutions to you at least once a month so we hope you tune in live or catch the on-demand series after the session is completed.Voice of #HealthcareCloud "Return to Work confidently work confidently with Microsoft Health Cloud"
Voices of #HealthcareCloud is a new webinar series hosted bymyselfand Vasu Sharma. My name is Shelly Avery, I am currently a Microsoft Teams Technical Specialist for Health and Life Sciences. Vaus is a Customer Success Manager for Microsoft 365 for Health and Life Sciences. Our goal of this webinar series is to showcase how Healthcare is seeing positive business and clinical outcomes with cloud technology.
