Keeping these cell phones charged for when you want to use them can be a challenge. If you are out and about you either have to limit yourself on the phone or have a car charger or a solar phone charger with you. The problem with the car charger is that you can only use it while in the car. The solar one though, you can carry with you. You can have it wherever you go.

Some of the chargers come in the way of phone cases. They protect the phones from getting harmed. A solar panel is also installed on the back cover of the case. When the sunlight hits the panel it generates a charge for the phone. These come in a variety of colors to suit your taste. Black, white, blue and green are available the last I checked anyway.

Other styles of solar chargers also can charge the phones. There are bags and backpacks that will handle charging certain phones. These both contain panels on them to collect the sun’s energy. Just place the phone in these bags or backpacks according to the enclosed instructions, and as you carry them around the phone will charge.

A solar phone charger can come in the form of a solar vest. This vest will charge many of your portable electronics including cell phones. These are usually bright colored and are worn for a variety of reasons, one profession that wears them are construction workers, who aren’t always near an electrical outlet.

There are some compact solar panels that can be hooked to your cell phone. These come in a variety of sizes and styles. It is amazing how far the solar panel has progressed. It used to just be big and bulky, now it can even be small and lightweight.

Whichever of these choices of the solar phone charger you choose; you will have power all day long for your communication needs. You won’t miss any important calls and you will be able to answer any and all text messages you get. This heightens your cell-phone experience. It is also safer to always have a charge on your phone in case of emergencies. Just think if the car stalls out and you need a tow, or you have a medical emergency and have to call one of the relatives about it. Don’t you want the cell phone charged and ready to use? Of course you do!

Whether you want a website for a personal project or as part of a business venture, the process of web design is critically important. The idea, of course, is for the end result to be an attractive, fully functional website which attracts visitors and in the case of business oriented sites, customers. Part of designing an effective website is to pay close attention throughout the design process to the goal of making the site user-friendly; if your site isn’t easy for visitors to navigate and find the content or access the functions they’re looking for, they’ll be looking elsewhere.

If you’d like to learn more about making your website easier to use and a generally more inviting destination for visitors, read on. Whether you’re building a new website from the ground up or if you’d like to make some changes to an existing website to enhance its usability, the suggestions below can help you to make your site more appealing to users and thus, more successful overall.

Be Concise:

Your site needs to communicate clearly and quickly to visitors in both design, email archiving, and HIPAA. People are impatient, especially when they’re online. With literally millions of other websites out there to visit, if you take too long to get your point across, you’ve lost your visitors; and if your website is part of your business, this means that you’ve lost them to your competitors.

Tell your visitors what they need to know without unnecessary padding; they’ll appreciate that you get right to the point and will be more likely to return for repeat visits. If your site is a ecommerce site, make sure that the checkout process is quick and easy and that any forms that customers need to fill out are as short as possible. The longer it takes them to complete the process, the more likely they are to decide to take their business elsewhere.

Clarity and Intuitive Navigation:

Apply what is known as the “alien test” to your website. Imagine that you are an alien visitor who just landed on the planet; can you look at your website and tell in 10 seconds or less what it’s all about?

The point of this test is to show the importance of making your site as self explanatory and easy to understand as possible. Your visitors should know at a glance what your site offers and how to find what they’re looking for.  This refers to both the content on your site, which should be as clear as possible and your site’s navigation, which should be equally straightforward. Include a navigation bar on every page with clearly labeled links to the pages and other content on your site which your visitors want. If visitors can’t figure out quickly where to find the information they’re looking for or your site is difficult and confusing to navigate, they’re not going to stick around for long.

Content:

Content isn’t a matter of web design in the strictest sense, but it is so important to your Dallas Web Design site’s usability and its ability to draw visitors that it should be given the same kind of attention and care. Content is king on the web, just as it always has been and having well written content on topics which are relevant to your visitors can go a long way towards helping you attract an audience, especially through organic search engine optimization. You don’t need to flood your site with content, but adding some new and informative pieces to your site on occasion can help to drive traffic as well as making your site more useful to your readers.

Security and privacy:

Consumers are becoming more savvy about online security and especially if you have an ecommerce site, you need to pay a lot of attention to ensuring that your site is secure enough that visitors will feel comfortable doing business there. Even if your site is not overtly commercial, your visitors want to know that their privacy is as important to you as it is to them; unless you have a legitimate reason for doing so, don’t ask your visitors to give out personal information or you may risk losing them. If you’re selling something, your visitors will be willing to share contact information with you once they decide to make a purchase from you - no one is too eager to give out this kind of information unless they need to, even if your site’s security is impeccable.

Much is said about the relative benefits of cloud computing. The ability to offload the responsibility of maintaining IT infrastructures, email archiving, system upgrades, patching and IT departments is an attractive one. But it isn’t necessarily the right one.

Software as a Service (SaaS) makes a compelling case for using cloud computing to solve many computing problems. There is a low startup cost, monthly billing, low overheads, and reliable systems. It turns what is a considerable investment into an annualized cost. However, it isn’t for everybody. Large organizations with existing infrastructures will benefit little from offloading some services to outside vendors.

There are two main advantages for keeping the email archive in-house. Security and convenience.

Security is a consideration for all of us. It has been the most-used term in our country since 9/11. In this context is was Enron that caused the word to be used around business, and particularly, email. It wasn’t the only high profile case in Wall Street that caused scandal, but it was the highest profile one.

You don’t have to deal in PFI or financial data to need an effective email archiving system nowadays. FRCP, SOX, HIPAA and FINRA are only four of many pieces of legislation that demand businesses from all industries maintain a coherent email archiving system in order to facilitate court proceedings.

Email data has become the new DNA evidence in civil and criminal litigation. Some e-discovery requests are fishing trips, some are to procure evidence, others are just for the sake of it. Whatever the motive behind them, companies still have to comply within a short space of time.

Many companies don’t want to offload that responsibility to a third-party. They want to maintain their own email security, and control how, when and where their email data is archived and stored.

Convenience should not be understated. The ability to integrate an email archive into an existing system is a great convenience. It means it can run in tandem with other services, piggy-back the network, be stored locally, and within the security confines of a secure network.

It’s also useful to have your own people, people you trust, manage and monitor your company’s email traffic. That’s true of any company, not just those who are transmitting secure emails or proprietary information over networks.

Some companies just want to control everything that goes on within their environment. That may not necessarily be for any specific reason, just because they can, or want to. That’s a laudable reason, as long as the email archive works, and abides by the appropriate legislation. It contains a significant overhead in time, money and resources, but some companies are more comfortable than others expending it.

The ability to completely control your own email traffic, manage your own email archive and satisfy any e-discovery request is an overriding factor in many decisions to manage email in-house. After all, when the buck stops with you, you may as well control the outcome first.

Once it has been ascertained that a covered entity has indeed broken the privacy rules then a complaint needs to be filed with the Office for Civil Rights.  The complaint must be in writing, but may be in email form or fax if preferred, and be sent to the correct regional office.  It must name the entity involved and contain a complete and lucid description of events and the reason why the rules have been broken.  A complainant has one hundred eighty days from the day of the incident to be accepted by the Office for Civil rights.

The complainant should not be scared of complaining if they firmly believe their rights have been contravened.  There is a specific clause in the rules that prohibit any kind of retaliation for filing a complaint.  If the Office for Civil Rights get to hear about any retaliations, they take a very dim view and the entity involved can get themselves into real trouble.

A good first step for any complainant is the Office for Civil Rights website where as much information as possible has been posted, and there is a complaint pack with guidance on how to complete it.  Some entities like Universities and some hospitals have their own HIPAA complaint procedures.  A complainant can choose which body to complain to, but if the entity itself is contacted it must be given adequate time to investigate and address the issue before complaining to the Office of Civil Rights.

As with any bureaucracy it will take time to process any complaint so this should be borne in mind once the complaint is made.  Adequate time must be allowed to pass to ensure the OCR can do its job.

Practical examples would be if a patient’s family are waiting in an ER or outside an operating theatre and the doctor or surgeon wants to update them on the patient’s condition, treatment or medical procedure.

Or if a patient is being looked after by a friend or family member, they are going to need to know the condition and types of care needed.  For example the type of medication, or particular type of care.  Any symptoms or side affects to be aware of, or how to provide a certain treatment at home.

These kinds of things are practical to the continued care and wellbeing of the patient and are permitted to be shared with (generally designated) family and friends.  These circumstances do not necessarily need the patients consent either.  In some circumstances the patient may not be able to offer their consent, if they are incapacitated or unfit.  The medical personnel are then permitted to make a judgement call of what information to share and with whom to share it.

There are also permitted discussions and use of PHI if a family member or friend is assisting or arranging payment for the treatment.  Some sharing of the medical information is going to be necessary to justify the bill, or allow the person to involve the insurance company.  Again, a good practical reason for sharing the information allowed under HIPAA.

So although the HIPAA is fairly stringent in controlling access to PHI, it tries to add a practical approach to how it handles things.  It is designed to protect the information as much as possible while not interfering with the actual care of the patient.

As a general guide, the law that offers the most protection to the patient in question wins.  The whole idea of HIPAA is to increase the privacy of medical records.  It doesn’t always succeed in its aims, but that’s beside the point.

There are clauses written in to the HIPAA Administrative Simplification Rules that will either override or be subject to State law depending on which law offers the most protection to the patient and their PHI.  These kind of judgements are generally made by a judge or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who administer HIPAA.  Even if state law contravenes HIPAA, a judgement may be made against HIPAA or for it depending on this decision.

There is a whole raft of criteria to be taken into account when making a decision, which is why it is reserved for judges and HHS officials.  HIPAA can certainly be curtailed if there is a risk of fraud or a compelling public health, or safety reason.  Prevention of crimes or abuses would certainly qualify.

So, like everything else that concerns HIPAA, it is complicated, convoluted and never straight forward.  However the first statement is as accurate an assessment a layman can make.  Whichever law protects the privacy of PHI the most wins.  So as with most things HIPAA, it’s heart may appear to be in the right place, even if it’s brain isn’t.

The HIPAA concentrates a lot on protecting PHI from other people, but can a patient see their own records?  In a word yes, after all the patient is the one being talked about in them!

A patient has the right to inspect a copy of their own PHI without charge at any time within reason.  A patient also has the right to obtain a copy of their records, again within reason.  An organization has the right to charge a fee for making a copy, ostensibly to cover the administration cost of the request.  As a record can in some cases be thousands of pages long, the patient should perhaps be selective about what is requested.

Apart from general curiosity there are many reasons why a patient would want to access their PHI.  The records can be used to seek a second opinion on a diagnosis or treatment, having a copy of the record would speed things up considerably.  As would having a copy when accessing a new doctor if a patient changed area or state.  Records are transferred as part of the procedure when changing practitioners, but having a copy of a record would speed things up if something was needed instantly.

Many decisions are based on the contents of a medical record.  If a patient believes they have had decisions that seem incorrect or unfair, then it is logical to find out on what information that decision is based.  If a patient was refused insurance, or the insurance refused a payout then it would also be a good idea to check the records. There may be mistakes or incorrect information in the record that needs to be changed that only you would recognize.  Although having a medical record amended can be a bit of a pain…

Then there is the thorny issue of malpractice.  The PHI may form either the basis or evidence towards a malpractice suit.  Having a copy will aid this both for the patient and their lawyers.

In the end, the patient has the right to view or copy their own medical records.  They don’t even have to have a reason, or disclose it if they don’t want to.

The idea was to have an all encompassing act that covered as much ground as possible with regards patient privacy and confidentiality.  As expected the act is complicated and convoluted even for lawyers to work with, let alone the people it is designed to protect.  It serves to protect any medical record that an individual may have and attempts to afford these records as much control and privacy as possible. The people responsible for enforcing the privacy aspect of HIPAA is the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and took effect in April 2003.

Within the act, patients are called ‘individuals’ and their medical records are called ‘PHI’ or ‘Personal Health Information’.  Any organization who handles PHI, or pays or receives electronic payment from an organization that conforms to HIPAA is subject to it.  PHI itself is regarded as any “individually identifiable health information” used, stored or transferred by any organization or entity, in any form.

There was a myth that the HIPAA only covered electronic information, but this is false.  It covers medical information as above in any form or media.  It doesn’t matter if it is electronic, paper or oral, the act applies.

The PHI itself is anything that could even loosely identify an individual and associate them with medical information.  It includes any past, present or future medical conditions, any healthcare provision information and any payments related to any healthcare provision.

Basically this all means that an organization covered by HIPAA is not permitted to disclose medical information to anybody unless the individual authorizes it or the privacy rule itself requires it.

As discussed last time HIPAA email is regarded as anything that contains any information relating to your medical records.  They don’t have to be the records themselves, they can be anything from your address or phone number, date of birth, social security number, next of kin, insurance information administrative or otherwise and even your admission information for any medical visits or stays.

It isn’t only clinics, hospitals or doctors that are subject to this.  Your employer is too if you have a health or medical plan.  If email is becoming an increasingly popular medium for transmitting your information then it is logical that those mails are stored somewhere.  Companies who handle this kind of information have to have an information storage strategy that complies with HIPAA and many other pieces of legislation.  Many companies handle this in-house with their existing staff and infrastructure.

Some outsource this burden to companies like Archive Compliance who will take care of their secure storage for them.  Companies like this have to demonstrate that their storage and retrieval methods are secure to be able to remain in business.

This method may not be palatable to everyone as you are paying out, but own nothing.  One the other hand you are paying someone to take all the hassle out of not just HIPAA email storage but all of your email storage needs.