Welcome to Smuggle Me

This last week I had been working with the insurance company to figure out how to send them a list of eligible students. Well, because the list contains social security numbers and things like that I couldn’t just send it in an email as is. I ended up creating a whole server and teaching them how to use SFTP to get the file. What a pain that was. Over email it took them 5 days to finally figure out how to get the file. I guess they don’t have a tech person on their staff.

Today I came across a much better solution for my problem. It uses document security with built-in protections to maintain the integrity of your data and to make it virtually tamper-proof. It looks like this type of document security was originally designed for CAD files, but I could see some major markets in the healthcare industry. This type of security is essential whenever you have to send something with PHI inside of it. Time to give it a try.

Today, someone stopped by my office from another doctor’s office. He asked about our operation and how we handled security in our place. There was so much to tell him, but the thing that he found most impressive was my biometric facial recognition software.

I can understand completely why he loves it. It is an incredibly amazing technology. It still amazes me each time I sit down at my computer and it logs me in. It was a great demo too because it logged me in so quickly he couldn’t even really see it working. He was in awe.

Despite the cool technology it has some major security roles in healthcare. With facial recognition software it is constantly watching to see if you are there. If it doesn’t see your face then it will automatically lock your computer. That means I don’t care if I leave my email open on my computer. It will lock automatically. It doesn’t matter if health information is open on my computer. It will lock automatically too.

Sure, you could secure your machine with an automatic logoff that is built into Windows, but anyone that has set that to 1 minute or 2 knows how annoying that is. I can set facial recognition software to lock after 5 seconds and work without any annoyances at my computer. Even if it does lock then when it sees my face it logs me right back in to where I left it.

That’s all I’m going to say here. Bottom line. Facial recognition software is not only cool, but also Much more secure.