This document provides recommendations for training topics on ensuring patient confidentiality. It discusses the importance of maintaining patient privacy and complying with regulations to uphold ethics and avoid legal issues. It recommends that healthcare providers only share the minimum necessary patient data needed for treatment, payment, and operations on a need-to-know basis. New employees will be trained on the policy of only accessing the data necessary to perform their jobs and will be subject to disciplinary action if they violate patient confidentiality.

1. ENSURING PATIENT
CONFIDENTIALITY
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TRAINING TOPICS

2. WHY PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY
• Avoiding issues with breaches of patient privacy important for trust
between patient and Health care providers
• Avoid prosecution for violation of HIPPA
• Uphold company ethics policy

3. Minimum need to know
• Sharing patient data only regarding what is needed to provide for the
need of patient: billing to treatment
• More important now with use of Electronic Health Records (HER)
• Important to maintain patient confidentiality in formal and informal
communications between care team members

4. Need to know basis for data sharing
• Sharing information necessary for treatment, payment, and
operations between health care team members and providers
• Need to know basis: if the team member doesn’t need to know the
specific detail about the patient, they should not be given the data or
have access to the data; sharing minimum amount of data needed to
facilitate collaborative care and what information is relevant to the
patient’s immediate care

5. EMPLOYEE TRAINING
• All new employees will be given a contract to read and sign: explains
company policy of ‘need to know’ and they are only to look at and
use data that they need to know to carry out their job; if they are
found to have violated this in their daily work, they will be subject to
disciplinary actions not excluding dismissal from employment
• Supervisors will review employee usage/ access to files 3 months
after hire and annually thereafter if no violations are found

6. REFERENCES
• Fox News. (2008). Report Over 120 UCLA hospital staff saw celebrity
health records (Links to an external site.). Retrieved
from https://www.foxnews.com/story/report-over-120-ucla-hospital-
staff-saw-celebrity-health-records.
• Van Liew, J. (2012). Balancing confidentiality and collaboration
within multidisciplinary health care teams. Journal of clinical
psychology in medical settings, 19(4), 411-417.