What's the difference between normal email and Mediref's send to email feature?
In addition to security, we must also take The Privacy Principles into account.
The Privacy Principles require a practice to have taken ‘reasonable steps’ to secure patient correspondence as best as they can. While email does not do this, using Mediref in this way does (seeing as the recipient is not on Mediref).
1. Mediref to Mediref correspondence is definitely more secure (and more reliable!). We started out Mediref in 2014 with just this one option, but quickly found that there was zero chance of anybody jumping into one system without a transitionary method in place.
With that said, the most secure practice as a Mediref user would be to get your entire network on to Mediref - that way email is only used for notification purposes and access to any correspondence will require a username and password. While we encourage this practice, we recognise that it may be impractical to do a hard switch over - and sending these temporary links provides that transitionary mechanism to send correspondence.
2. The link sent by email expires, after which it is no longer accessible. Something not available in email. Links can be expired by the sender, retrospectively, at any time. Individual files can also be deleted retrospectively (i.e. the sender retains control even after the email has been sent, allowing for steps to be taken in the event of a mistakenly sent file or mistaken recipient).
3. Sensitive health information is kept within our servers, rather than getting sent via mail servers which tend to be distributed around the world. Australian Privacy Act requires the health information component to stay within Australia.
We encourage you to pose the exact same question to your professional body (ADA, AMA etc.) and ask them their take on this (i.e. - "If our practice adopts a secure messaging service that our recipients are not using, what is the recommended way by which we should send them correspondence?").
In the future, we hope to discontinue this feature in favour of everybody being either on Mediref, or a compatible alternative that can communicate with Mediref, allowing email to be bypassed entirely.
Let me know your thoughts, suggestions or any other queries you have.