“Do the right thing even when no one is watching.”  That was always one of my father’s axioms.  It is a philosophy of being responsible and accountable to your own personal standard and having a standard that is independent of the setting.  “The right thing” is something you know in your heart.

In business, “the right thing” is sometimes confused with “the right thing for our business” or “the right thing for our profits”.  It is easy to cut the corner in business to make things more profitable.  It is easy to focus on a short-term gain more than a long-term relationship.  It becomes easy in business to not hold your company’s standard up to your own.  It’s “just business” for many companies…

In telemedicine, we have a responsibility to get certain things exactly right every time.  Security is critical! We are entrusted with safeguarding your personal information and your electronic health data.  It is a responsibility that is not only vital to our company but a sacred responsibility to our customers.  We have our servers hosted on the most secure cloud servers in the world at Armor (http://www.armor.com). This is a company that goes the extra mile to provide top-notch security for your data.  They are responsible for the infrastructure of our servers, while we are responsible for the data put into those servers.  Our team at iHeartDoc is up to date on the latest threats and phishing/social engineering schemes that are a daily threat to data security.  Your electronic protected health information (ePHI) is safe in our HIPAA compliant, HITRUST certified servers.  Our security team undergoes regular audits and remediation analysis to ensure the most secure environment possible for your data.  Your data security is our responsibility.

As a physician, I often tell patients that the most important aspect of a doctor-patient relationship is trust.  If you can’t trust your doctor, you need to find another doctor.  The same goes with any company providing telemedicine or keeping your health data.  If you can’t trust that company to “do the right thing even when no one is watching”, you need to find another company you can trust.