|
New Articles
 |
Under lock & key Of equal importance is the responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of health records. Before the inception of computer technology, all health information was kept in paper folders in a file cabinet. Unless someone physically broke into the office and rummaged through the files, personal health information was relatively safe. With the age of electronic exchange of information many people are now able to see private health information. For this reason, all healthcare providers have been given rules of conduct, just as the military was in the 1940s. You know them as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Detailed guidelines for the clinical environment in the actual final version of the HIPAA Privacy Rule do not contain specific guidelines for the clinical environment. Covered providers are required to implement reasonable and appropriate safeguards for the size, complexity, available resources, and technical sophistication of their businesses. Reasonable and appropriate safeguards minimize the risk of inadvertent disclosures of protected health information without harming patients, harming the health or safety of others, inhibiting providers’ ability to obtain payment, or causing excessive disruption. For instance, a hospital may consider locking some of its file cabinets which are unsupervised most of the time because it seems like a reasonable and appropriate thing to do, given the number of cabinets and the fact that not all of them are in secure or at least constantly supervised areas. A dentist with a filing system that is under staff supervision at all times during business hours and is not accessible to unauthorized persons might think that installing locks on the filing system may be going too far. Both are correct for their situation and in compliance with the HIPAA Privacy Rule because decisions were thought out and considered reasonable and appropriate. Another example is the placement of daily schedules. Obviously patients should not be allowed to read the schedule. This does not mean, however, that it needs to be stored in a cabinet. Even if the patient can see them, can they read the names while sitting in the chair? Would moving the schedule to a different location make any difference? Would looking for the schedule waste the time of a busy staff member? Moving the schedule out of sight might be a reasonable solution, but using a smaller font size might be reasonable as well. In order to be compliant with the HIPAA Privacy Rule, offices need to think of a reasonable way to minimize the risk of a breach of privacy and then implement what works best for their individual situations. Angie Stone, RDH, BS, spent five years on active duty in the United States Navy in the dental profession. After her enlistment ended, she spent the next nine years dental assisting before beginning her dental hygiene career, and has since served as an adjunct instructor of clinical and didactic dental hygiene and dental assisting. She also functions as a consultant for the Head Start Program and consults with dental business and hygiene operations through McKenzie Management. Contact her at angie@mckenziemgmt.com. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (1997), obtained 1-20-08
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
