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The Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA) is a requirement set forth by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The Act defines printers, faxes, copiers, multifunction printers or any other electronic devices that print or store data as “workstations.” Workstations, as defined by HIPAA, are required to be secured and maintained in accordance with HIPAA requirements. Printers can present some of the biggest threats to medical facilities ranging from doctors’ offices, dentists, pharmacies, even chiropractors. Making sure that your printers and copiers are HIPAA-compliant is a law, and violations are subject to fines of up to $1.5 million. In today’s fast-moving high tech environment, printers are prime targets for security breaches. Cyberattacks are becoming more prevalent, and extra effort is required to keep printers and their networks safe. A Hewlett-Packard study found that 90 percent of enterprises have experienced a security breach related to printers.

What makes a printer HIPAA compliant?

Several companies manufacture HIPAA-compliant printers, but in most cases they don’t meet all of the requirements with factory default settings. Small desktop printers on a worker’s desk are basically compliant because they don’t store data after it’s printed and is secured and set up to be used by a limited number of people. Printers such as these don’t have a hard drive like the larger freestanding or multifunctional printers (MFP). Multifunctional printers, like computers, have a hard drive that stores images of the documents they print, so they require special settings, handling, and maintenance.

1. For an MFP to be approved for hipaa compliant printing, it must be in a secure location not easily accessible to anyone not authorized to use it.
2. Printers that have hard drives require special security maintenance. Because the hard drive stores printed data, it must be wiped clean periodically. Also, it’s imperative that the drive is cleaned before you dispose of it.
3. Printers must have a feature that allows someone to send a document to print, yet remain in a queue. It will print out only after the authorized person keys in a code or PIN. This prevents printed documents from sitting unattended in an output tray.
4. Printers should ideally have an automatic log-off feature after someone enters a PIN and completes the print job.
5. All personal health information (PHI) is required to be encrypted using SSL encryption protocol, and the network handling the data must also be secured.
6. Documents should be monitored and tracked from the time they’re sent to the printer until they’re retrieved.

All of these protocols should be part of an overall PHI protection protocol compliant with HIPAA regulations, but they’re not effective unless personnel are trained on their proper use and understand the overall facility information security plan. Often, employees are the weakest link in the security chain, so they must be trained on how printed personal data relates to HIPAA. Although the MFPs have features that help comply with HIPAA, the individuals using the printer must be trained on its use and settings. They’re also responsible for staying current on all updates to the HIPAA guidelines that affect all electronic devices.

Which printers?

Most major MFP manufacturers offer models that are HIPAA-compliant or have the capability of being HIPAA-compliant once they’re set up and configured properly. Manufacturers such as Xerox and Hewlett-Packard, and possibly others, market MFPs that are specifically developed for use in medical environments. However, manufacturers such as Brother, Ricoh, Minolta, Hughes, and Epson all have models that can be set up to be secure and safeguard PHI.

Globally, the real estate market showed an improvement in 2018, however, in the US, that is really not the case. Far from hopeless, real estate professionals agree that 2019 is an important year for residential and commercial real estate agents and the direction real estate will take going forward. Although current statistics and trends show that the number of competitors in the real estate market is lower, the quantity of competitors is increasing. Finding new leads and converting them to clients is now by far the most critical aspect of the real estate business. Marketing agencies, bloggers and email providers are all now somewhat hampered by the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) prohibits autodialers or robocalls to call any mobile line. They are only allowed to reach landlines. With these restrictions come the advent of the ringless voicemail drops.

What is a Ringless Voicemail (RVM)?

An RVM allows you to leave a message for number without actually calling the number. It does so without disturbing them thus it is a very nonintrusive way to leave a message. The message appears in their voice mailbox for them to read at their convenience. This is an excellent tool for leaving an effective message consistent with your marketing campaign.

How Can Ringless Voicemail Technology Boost Your Real Estate Company?

1. 1. Accelerating the conversion of leads to clients (generates leads). By using messages, you can introduce yourself and your company in a friendly and professional way that will leave a good impression. If crafted properly, the message will give the recipient a reason to call back.
   2. Reducing overhead. The cost of RVM is pennies, depending on the quantity you want to send. Companies offer pricing structures that will work for any size company.

• Managing complaints and having quick response times. Using RVM to follow up on open actions can help with problems that often arise from miscommunication. Also, it can be used to effectively and quickly diffuse difficult situations by addressing issues in a more timely manner than playing phone tag.

• Enhanced customer service. You can be proactive when dealing with customer service issues and you can also use RVM as the all-important follow-up.

• Ability to deliver mass communications about products, offerings, events, etc. Ringless voicemails can be extremely effective as a marketing outreach tool as you are striving to find new leads. It is a simple process of uploading your contact list (phone numbers), preparing an effective marketing message, scheduling when you want the “campaign” to start and stop, and then send. With this technology, you can also measure your return or open rate.

Reasons Why Real Estate Businesses Should Love Ringless Voicemails

Nonintrusive: Instead of possibly angering someone with an uninvited call at a bad time, RMV drops the message into their voicemail quietly so the recipient can listen at their convenience.

Gets attention: They will only be listening to your voicemail at the time it is played back, and is not competing with flyers, emails, and other forms of marketing collateral.

Reaches a lot of people simultaneously:  As an outbound marketing campaign, the number of people you reach out to is only limited by the number of contacts you choose to upload. It is possible to reach up to thousands of people by merely clicking send.

Easy to use: RVM marketing campaigns are generally easy to set up. Once you have your script, it’s just a matter of recording it, uploading your contact list and pressing send.

It’s affordable: Campaigns can start as low at $0.02 per drop.

High response rate: RVM has an “open rate” of 92 percent, the highest in the outbound marketing business. Text messaging ranks second with an 81 percent open rate.

Ringless Voicemail is effective is done properly. It should be integrated as part of a larger marketing strategy. It must have a high-quality contact list. You must have good messages that are personal, informative and written to elicit a return call. Keeping these things in mind, real estate companies can surely benefit from the rising popularity of this technology.

Every business should promote their work in a multitude of different ways. Whether it’s through advertising, co-sponsoring an event, or pushing out a regular email newsletter, some variety increases the potential for new customers to see your business.

Another way businesses can advocate for their business is through promotional materials and free give-away items. Everyone loves some free promotional pens or a koozie, and it’s a great way to get your company’s logo and brand out there to the public. Best of all, they can easily be given out at public events.

Here are a few different promotional materials in which all companies should consider investing some time, energy, and funds.

Pens and writing utensils

One of the most common and inexpensive ways to promote your company is by passing out branded writing utensils. Whether it’s promotional pens, pencils, highlights, or something else entirely, writing utensils are something that people use daily.

They write down notes at work, grocery lists at home, and the phone numbers of new friends out at the bar. Writing utensils that are clearly labeled with your brand will be used often, making them a great promotional tool.

Banners

Something you can’t really give away, but will come in handy at events or tablings, are branded banners. Banners are a great tool for marketing your company, and they provide a large backdrop to show off your logo to crowds of people.

Depending on the size of the banner, you can get a smaller one that can adorn a table, or a large one that can hang on the wall. And software and firmware that allows you to edit, design, and create a uniform logo and save it in a read-only memory will help with printing and preserving it for future marketing use.

Clips

A staple item in anyone’s kitchen or office, clips are a great promotional material for any business to use. Whether it be the standard clips used to hold close chip bags or other kitchen items or the alligator clips often found in technology-based work settings, having clips with your logo will follow new audience members from work to home.

Branded technology

An easy way to target new audience members is to slap your logo on simple tech items that can be cheaply made, budgeted for, and handed out for free.

Earbuds are a great example, since so many people use them for listening to music or podcasts at the gym or during commutes. They are also cheaply made and can be easily branded with your logo. Other items could include portable charges, USB cables, or flash drives.

Since technology is more expensive than some of the other items, be strategic in deciding which ones you’ll get for promotional use. If you’re a data informatics firm, passing out flash drives makes sense. Likewise, if you’re a music production company, earbuds might be a more on-brand choice.

Sticky notes

Lastly, something every office needs is sticky notes. People use them to leave themselves reminders, write important information down for consistent viewing, and to let coworkers know they stopped by their desk. Having branded sticky note pads that professionals can use daily will ensure your logo’s always in their field of vision.

Promotional materials are a great way to seek out new customers and to continue to target current ones. However, they have more wide-reaching perks to them too. By giving out branded free items to your employees, it creates a feeling of family in the office. If everyone has a branded mug on their desks, people will feel like they belong and will continue to do great work for the company.

While inbound marketing strategies and content marketing have become the cream of the crop lately, there is still a place for direct marketing in any business.

Direct marketing campaigns are still one of the most efficient ways to communicate important messages to your audience. As such, it’s never a bad idea to think about new ways to increase the ROI of your direct marketing efforts.

Whether you’re a small business or a mid-sized company looking to reach the next level in your development, here are four surefire ways to improve your direct marketing campaigns.

Start using A/B testing

AB testing is one of the best ways to test how the decisions you’re making play a role in customer behavior. By offering users two different options, you can begin to measure how button placement, anchor text, color, and more play a role in influencing how a customer engages with your business. You can A/B test anything from an email newsletter to the design of your website.

Many platforms even offer you the ability to offer two separate versions of the same content to test on smaller portions of your audience. Then you can distribute the more popular version to a wider list based on how each campaign performs. This approach to direct marketing ensures that your emails have maximum impact by drawing on the way your existing audience engages with them.

The result is a much higher ROI for your communications, which can be a boon for any business.

Analyze your data

Oftentimes as a business owner, you may feel like you’re making decisions in a vacuum, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Harnessing customer data is one way to do that, since it can help you learn more about the areas where your business is meeting your customer’s needs and where you could improve.

Recognizing specific sales trends and using them to predict future behavior is one way to implement this kind of data. If you know that a product sells better during a certain season, it may be worth featuring it in your direct marketing campaigns near that season.

From refining and defining your audiences to assisting in scheduling your campaigns, customer data can be a veritable treasure trove of information when it comes to optimizing your direct marketing practices.

Expand your audience

Another way to improve your marketing campaigns is to expand your audience by finding potential customers who have similar attributes to your existing client base. For example, if you see that a specific product does particularly well with a unique subsection of your audience (like women aged 26-35), it may be worth finding a lookalike audience for this particular demographic.

Paying for targeted mailing lists is one way to achieve this. You’ll be able to curate a list of consumers based on a variety of factors like geography, age, gender, credit rating, and more.

Pick the right medium

Remember that when it comes to direct marketing, you have a variety of options to consider, from email to social media to mail and display ads. If your data reveals certain information about how different forms of communication perform with different audiences, you can leverage your customers’ preferences to increase your ROI for each campaign.

Reading up on various consumer reports can also help you ensure that the medium is a good match for your message. For example, while many people would stereotype millennials as an audience which cares more about social media marketing, some studies have illustrated that direct mail actually has a huge return when delivered to millenials.

As a business owner, you should always be looking for ways to improve how you operate. Marketing often offers room for improvement, so taking a good, hard look at your approach to direct marketing can really bolster your business’ performance.

Keep the above ideas in mind as you audit your direct marketing strategies so that you can create even stronger sales for your company.

If you run a modern small business, you can’t afford to ignore search engine optimization. The set of techniques known as “SEO” for short are all about getting Google and the rest of the search engine gang to move your business up the search engine results page for relevant queries.

But how do you go about doing this, and what sorts of searchers could become your next customers? Here’s what you need to know about setting goals and getting results in the exciting world of SEO.

Relevance is everything

Google fields trillions of search queries every year. A quick look at Google trends will show you that some queries are searched millions of times. Being at the top of one of those search engine result pages would be wild: You’d get millions of clicks.

Highly trafficked search terms are the toughest to rank for, though. Besides, your business website isn’t going to convert a lot of searchers into customers if you target people searching for “Tom Brady,” for example (unless you run a sports collectibles shop that sells Tom Brady memorabilia). The best way to approach SEO is to target the right queries and keywords.

That means considering how your current and future customers will try to find you. Will they search for “auto repair,” “car maintenance,” or both? Will they search for “tailor” or “tuxedo rentals?” Keyword research is critical to exposure.

Keyword research is something that you can do using sites like Google Trends and other search engines and SEO resources. It’s also something that you can hire experts to do, though, and that might not be a bad idea (as we’ll see later on, experts can be a huge help in SEO). Just be sure to communicate your business goals so that the pros can line them up with your SEO goals.

Link to the future

A lot goes into great search engine optimization. But if you really want to move up the search engine results page, then you’ll want to turn to SEO experts who will give you a great link-building strategy.

Links are at the core of how search engines work; in fact, they’re how the “web crawlers” that search engines use to map the internet get around. Google considers links to be an indicator of a site’s quality (if you’re highly cited, Google reasons that you must be knowledgeable). However, the best link building company for you will also know that not all links are created equal. You need quality links from sites with high “domain authority” scores, so that Google will admire the links and move you up the rankings.

Understanding your progress

So, if you invest in SEO, you should fly right up the search engine results page, right? Not necessarily.

Unfortunately, SEO progress is a bit more slow-and-steady than that. Getting to where you want to go will take time and experimentation. Google isn’t apt to change its opinions overnight and, if you try to get it to do so, you could bring unwanted attention to your SEO tactics. The best SEO strategy focuses on white hat techniques that will gradually push your business into a better and better position in regard to search engines.

Outsource your SEO

Great search engine optimization is tricky. There are a lot of factors involved. Sure, links loom large, but they’re not all that matters: You have to worry about the text on your site, HTML code and commands, and so much more.

You don’t have time for all of that; you have a business to run. That’s why it’s a good idea to outsource your SEO to experts in SEO and digital marketing. With the right professionals in your corner, you can rest assured that you’re moving up the rankings while still focusing on the things that your business is really here to do.

Working in social care is an admirable while fulfilling career. Yet, in many ways, not two social worker jobs are the same. The differences can be small, but how to handle each encounter has to be evaluated on a case by case basis. In this article we will look at some of the bigger differences within social work, by looking at different specialisations within social care. Hopefully, if you are considering social care as a career this will show some of the variation possible within that.

Substance abuse social worker:

In this role you would most likely be based within a hospital or rehabilitation facilities. You are there to help those with a wide range of mental health problems that can arise from substance misuse. It is important to note that a substance abuse social worker has to simultaneously find both short and long term solutions while working with their client.

Community social worker:

Being based in a specific geographically based area, this social work role is to help bring that feeling of a community to the forefront of this area. This could involve working with community-based charities to help organise events. Or you could be working with the more vulnerable members of a community, and making sure they feel equally part of it.

Palliative care social worker:

Finding out you’re terminally ill, or being a family member and finding out this is the case for a loved one, is devastating. A palliative care social worker helps both the terminally ill and their respective family to feel as comfortable and at ease as possible, with something that there is no simple solution for. This is a highly challenging area of social work, with a lot of resilience, empathy and patience needed if you are going to succeed in this area.

Child social worker:

In this role you can find yourself in all sorts of situations that involve children. This could be helping a child through trauma, dealing with specific mental illnesses or physical disabilities. It can also be helping parents with certain situations, or through the transition period when there is a new primary care giver. You may also find yourself working in schools, helping overcome obstacles that interfere with learning.

This is by no means a complete list. If you don’t see something that seems the right fit for you, carry on exploring what other roles there are in social work. More importantly, try and work out why those areas of social work stimulate your interest over others. As this can help define key characteristics of social work that appeals to you.

Succeeding as an entrepreneur in today’s competitive market can be difficult. After all, we are living in a fast-paced world that is filled to the brim with talented people. But if you continuously fret about the roadblocks, you’ll likely never get started on your entrepreneurial journey.

Fortunately, there’s help out there for people who want to pursue a career as an entrepreneur without losing their mind along the way. Today, we’ll review the tangible benefits that can be derived when you hire a professional life coach like Ryan Nivakoff. If you’ve never heard of a life coach before, you’ve come to the right place!

Benefits of Hiring a Life Coach

If you’ve never hired a life coach, you likely don’t even know what they are or what they can do for you. A life coach isn’t some new-age concept. In fact, you will find that life coaches are used in just about every major industry in the world. From Silicon Valley tech developers to aspiring football players, professionals call on life coaches to help cultivate a solid foundation. Life coaches work directly with their clients in order to cultivate clear goals, strong relationships, and success in the workplace.

Think of a life coach as a cross between a co-worker, a therapist, and your boss. Life coaches work directly with you in order to outline your goals, your skills, and your strategies. Through intensive meetings, either in person or on the internet, you will begin to cultivate a detailed plan that keeps you accountable while also directing your energy toward progressing in your goals. Remember, there are many types of life coaches for many different reasons.

If you are interested in hiring a life coach to help you launch a new career or other life venture, you need to outline what you are looking for from the position. Let’s look at a few different ways you can decide what kind of life coach is right for you.

1) Area of Focus – Do you need specific help in any single area? Are you struggling with social relationships? Keeping your diet in check? Outlining your next business plan? Whatever your goals are, have an idea of what you’d like to accomplish ready before your first session.

2) Communication – Do you thrive off of face-to-face communication or can you operate effectively with your coach over the phone? Some life coaches like to meet face-to-face while others are okay with keeping the relationship digital.

3) Accountability – Finally, you are going to have to come into your first meeting with an idea of your goal in mind. Once you know what you are aiming to accomplish, your life coach can help to develop a plan in order to keep you accountable.

Hiring a life coach is one of the most effective ways that modern entrepreneurs can work to improve their career’s outlook. From cultivating a business plan to having someone around to keep you accountable, a life coach can make all of the difference in the world.

Introduction

While we all won’t have glasses someday, a large majority of the population will. The problem is, most people don’t know when it is time to go see the eye doctor. For that reason, Matthew Davies is here to help us know when it is time. We may not like it, but it is just a fact of life. As we get older, things don’t work as well as they should. So, let’s not muck about and learn when it is time to see the eye doctor.

Blurred Vision

When we say blurred vision, we are not talking about after a night on the town and overindulging a little bit. We are talking about an extended period of blurred vision. Some of the ways that you can tell if your vision is becoming blurred is if you don’t recognize friends more than ten steps away anymore or when you cannot read your favorite book or magazine up close anymore. This may mean that you have or are developing farsightedness or nearsightedness. There is nothing wrong with that. It happens to the best of us. It just means that it may be time to see your eye doctor.

Night Vision

There are several indicators in this category. If you are having a hard time seeing at night, then you might have a problem. Obviously, we are not talking when it is completely dark. Additionally, we are not talking about things that are far away. Our eyes are not equipped to see in low light. However, if you can’t see something right in front of you and there is a little bit of light in the area, you might have a problem.

The second part of night vision is if you are having issues going from high levels of light to lower levels. While it is normal to have issues for the first minute or so, our eyes adjust quickly. If you are taking more than 5 minutes to adjust to the different light level, then you might have a problem. That is no reason to be ashamed. Simply book an appointment with your eye doctor. They will be more than happy to help you.

Computers

Love them or hate them, computers are here to stay for the foreseeable future. The problem is, they are starting to contribute to nearsightedness. The reason for this is, we never focus on anything more than two feet away from our face anymore. Maybe if you have a big television across the room, but that is not much better. You can try to avoid this by spending 20 seconds staring more than 20 feet away from you every 20 minutes. This is known as the 20-20-20 rule.

Conclusion

Matthew Davies knows that no one wants to get glasses. They have been made fun of for years and years. If you think you have a problem, it is best that you stow your vanity and do what is right for your eyes. Ignoring the problem will only make things worse.