The security of the Protected Healthcare Information (PHI) of patients should be a top priority for all healthcare organizations today. Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations are not taking all the necessary steps to protect PHI when sending and receiving it from their network of customers and vendors.

Using regular email or FTP to communicate with your network of physicians, payers, and providers is not allowed under HIPAA rules. If you are currently using any kind of "secure" email system to share PHI, you are only protecting information that you send. You are not providing your network of physicians, payers, and providers with a secure way to get messages and data to you.

How can your organization protect its PHI while sending and receiving it from your network of customers and vendors? The Secure File Transfer System can help you to meet this challenge.

• To determine whether your organization is adequately protecting its PHI, please take a look at the questions in the Security Checklist.
• To learn about organizations that did not protect their PHI and had data breaches as a result, please see our Data Breaches page.
• To learn about how you can protect your PHI, please see our Secure File Transfer System overview page.