Handling requests for information from law enforcement can throw staff for a loop. Most staff are aware of their organization’s policies and the basic HIPAA requirements for disclosing patient information to family members, friends, and other individuals such as legal guardians. But handling requests from law enforcement officials can be a different matter.
Patient care continues to move from the inpatient setting to outpatient. With this change, the challenge of securing comprehensive documentation that articulates the services rendered and the patient care provided now needs to extend across the care continuum.
A national effort to solve patient misidentification errors is suspended, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives announced on November 15.
Q: It is my understanding that we can make PHI disclosures using our EHR for payment/treatment/healthcare operations without a consent and that we do not need to track these requests for an accounting of disclosures. Has this changed?
Alert fatigue defeats the purpose of EHR medication alerts, according to a recent studythat looked at how often medication-related clinical decision alerts were overridden, the reasons given for the overrides, and how appropriate the reasons were.
Q: A local school has asked us to come in and provide flu shots to the students and staff. Do we need to ask each person who gets the shot to sign our Notice of Privacy Practices (NPP), or can the school do so on their behalf and provide the information to them?
