7 Features in Office 365 your Dental practice should implement today

There is so much hype and publicity around the Microsoft Office 365 platform that it is often difficult to determine which features are appropriate for dental practices.  It is true that there are endless possibilities within the Office 365 family of products, but below we have outlined a few specific features that are most important for your dental practice today.

Message Encryption

Encryption is essentially a security requirement that a dental practice must meet.  Email is a core dental practice communication tool, and often the easiest and quickest way to share information.  Encryption provides “reasonable and appropriate” protection for patient information.

Large file transfer

If you have ever received a large email or attachment that slowed your computer down, large file sizes may be the problem.  Many digital dental images or scanned patient files are large files.  Often, these files need to be shared with another practice or individual.

Office 365 offers an easy way to attach a document link, instead of the entire file.  These files can be stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, included as part of an Office 365 subscription.

Protect patient data after it leaves your inbox

With SharePoint, you can share files with external users (people not connected to your network) by inviting them as “Guests”.  There are choices regarding sign-in and passwords (or none required).  Most importantly, you can “Set Expiration” and choose how long before the link expires, such as 30 days.

Auditing

Along with the other recent improvements, Microsoft OneDrive for Business and SharePoint include auditing and reporting of user activity.  This allows you or someone in your practice to review and audit access records to files and patient data.

Email archiving

If your dental practice determines that archiving of email would address HIPAA requirements, Microsoft’s Exchange Online Archiving provides several benefits.

• Emergency access to all previously sent and received emails
• Exact copy of email for electronic records disclosure
• Long term retention of email related to other compliance, which cannot be edited or deleted by staff

Advanced Threat Protection

Spam, virus, and malware protection is built-in to Exchange Online Protection.  However, many dental practices see the need for more advanced security protection from increasingly sophisticated hacker attacks.

That is why Microsoft has developed Advanced Threat Protection.  This enhanced filtering service provides an additional layer of protection with the following advantages.

• Protect against unknown or ‘zero-day’ threats
• Blocking of malicious URLs or redirects to unsafe websites
• Reporting and message tracing provide insight into message origin or which email addresses are being targeted.

HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA)

Microsoft Office 365 offers a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement to all customers.

If you have questions or would like an in-person demonstration of any of the features above…