Patient Confidentiality efforts

1. Training to Protect Patient Confidentiality
Jennifer Gendron
MHA690: Health Care Capstone
Instructor Hwang-Ji Lu
August 8, 2014

2. CONCERNS REGARDING PATIENT
CONFIDENTIALITY
~ There have been numerous instances that have
arisen over the past years of patient information being
viewed by nonessential personnel at the medical
facilities patients are admitted to, specifically celebrity
patients.
~ Not only are celebrities being targeted for breaching
in their medical records, but other non-celebrities share
an equal concern that their information is going beyond
the eyes of necessary health care professionals.

3. TRAINING TECHNIQUES
•One way to ensure that celebrity medical information stays
confidential is to train the health care professionals to enter
all information for the patient under an anonymous or alias
such as John Doe orTrauma X-ray. Some hospitals have also
designed a new feature in medical data entry that blocks full
social security numbers for the safety of the patient.This will
only protect the patient on one level, there are those that
will inevitably see the patient and that requires another level
of training.

4. TRAINING TECHNIQUES
•Another level of company training can be to teach all
employees the policies and procedures for patient in-
processing and who are the appropriate personnel and chain
of command for handling patient records. By limiting access
to medical records with security codes and firewalls to
halter hacking into records will assist with storing the
records away from nonessential personnel.

5. TRAINING TECHNIQUES
•During employee orientation, as well as continued trainings
thereafter, employers should teach their staff about the severity
of breaking ethical and moral codes to fulfill their curiosity of a
patients confidential information, and furthermore, stress the
consequences and repercussions of such actions.
•Quarterly, semiannual, and annual reviews of policies should be
reviewed and signed by all employees to ensure they understand
the policies, and have agreed to follow them, and are aware of the
potential legal ramifications that can be taken if policies and
procedures are broken.

6. References
National Ethics Committee of theVeterans Health
Administration. (2004). Online patient-clinician messaging: Fundamentals
of ethical practice. Retrieved
from http://www.ethics.va.gov/docs/necrpts/NEC_Report_20040701_Onlin
e_Clinician-Pt_Messaging.pdf
Wolper, L.F. (2011). Health care administration: Managing organized delivery
systems (5th Ed.). Boston: Jones and Bartlett.