Electronic Communications Policy

Advanced Wellness Solutions welcomes your questions and comments.  You can contact us by calling (772) 403-7640.

When communicating with any health professional via email –  you must keep in mind the fact that email is not secure and the outlook is grim for the prospect of creating an inexpensive, easy to use effective encryption model for email.

In other words, information you send via email may be intercepted and read at multiple points during the transmission.  For this reason, Advanced Wellness Solutions recommends that you should never send sensitive information via email – ever!!!

According to an article at Digital Trends  there are four places where your email can be compromised:

• On your device(s)
• On the networks
• On the server(s)
• On your recipient’s device(s)

With this in mind, Advanced Wellness Solutions strongly suggests that patients communicate with the practice via phone about any issue they may have.

While we perform due diligence in our digital security procedures, as illustrated above, there are always multiple points between you hitting send and our reception of the message where your information can be compromised.

Advanced Wellness Solutions has created the following guidelines  for electronic communications as suggested and outlined by the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

• Electronic Communication Triage:
  Advanced Wellness Solutions’ staff respond to electronic communications between the public and Advanced Wellness Solutions.  When you communicate with Advanced Wellness Solutions electronically, expect to wait between 3 and 5 business days for a response.

  You should never use email to alert the staff about a medical emergency.

  If you suspect that you or a loved one are experiencing a medical emergency, call 9-1-1 and then call your healthcare provider.

• Clerical overhead:
  The administrative staff at Advanced Wellness Solutions are responsible for adding information exchanged via electronic communication to the patients digital health record. This information is manually added to the patient record by the Advanced Wellness Solution staff.
• Categorization and redirection of mail:
  Each Advanced Wellness Solutions service provider has his/her own email account.  We do not encourage communicating via email.

• Selective access for patients:
  The email addresses for Advanced Wellness Solutions are available upon request.

• Archiving and backup:
  Electronic communications such as email are accessed via POP-3.  This means that messages are downloaded from the Advanced Wellness Solutions hosting account to the office computer of Advanced Wellness Solutions. Email repositories are archived and cleared every 90 days.  Email messages will be stored for 5 years on a removable hard drive. Critical information will be manually added by the Advanced Wellness Solutions staff to a patient’s EHR.

• Forbidden topics:
  Advanced Wellness Solutions will now allow discussion of highly sensitive topics via electronic means.

• Selective confidentiality:
  Patients should not include information in any electronic communications that they don’t wish to appear in their EHR.

  The staff of Advanced Wellness Solutions will not alter, expurgate or sequester archived messages.

• Clinic-provided e-mail accounts:
  Patients will not be provided with clinic email accounts.

• Outcomes evaluation:
  Advanced Wellness Solutions will evaluate the efficacy and usefulness of e-mail with patients on a yearly basis. The criteria used to evaluate these factors will include monetary cost-benefit analysis, patient satisfaction, and provider perception.