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Cloud-based practice management, electronic health records (EHR) and medical billing software and services provider CareCloud announced a partnership with file-sharing site Box at the annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference on Oct. 2, which integrates Box’s secure content-sharing and collaboration capabilities into the CareCloud cloud-based platform.
Providers using CareCloud’s platform can give patients access to their health records and financial documents through the CareCloud Community patient portal. Moving forward, this functionality will be extended to Box, allowing providers to store, manage and access these documents from a patient’s Box account.
CareCloud develops user-friendly software solutions to increase profitability and productivity for health-care professionals. CareCloud’s platform powers more than 3,500 providers in 47 states, supporting more than five million unique patients, according to a company release.
“There is so much that health care can learn from other industries. At CareCloud, we see the value in partnering with the best technology innovators to help our customers be successful,” Albert Santalo, CEO of CareCloud, said in a statement. “With its HIPAA-compliant offering, Box is the perfect partner as we look to expand our offerings for physicians. Additionally, CareCloud and Box both share a commitment to developing on an open API platform, so this partnership made sense both culturally and technologically, and we are excited to offer the resulting integrated solution to the market.”
In July, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a study that showed how doctors are using EHRs to provide more information securely to patients, and ultimately improve patient care. As patients become more active in their health care, providers are finding there is an increasing need for protected, intuitive, cloud-based storage applications to facilitate easy access and sharing of health information, the report indicated.
“At Box, our goal in health care is to connect disparate parties and enable collaboration by providing a secure, cloud-based, collaboration platform,” Whitney Bouck, Box’s senior vice president and general manager of enterprise, said in a statement. “The cloud allows for platform-agnostic applications to be accessible and deployed wherever the doctor or patient needs access to information. By working with leading innovators in the electronic health record space, like CareCloud, we can help both providers and patients make medical records and documents more portable and accessible.”
Despite the growing push towards EHR technologies, doctors need to educate consumers about digital medical records to comply with upcoming federal mandates, as more health-care providers continue to adopt them, a survey from Xerox and Harris Interactive found.