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Volume 10 | Issue 12
Inside This Issue
December Edition 2020
Smartphones, Texts, and HIPAA: Strategies to Protect Patient Privacy By Kim Hathaway, MSN, CPHRM Patient Safety Healthcare Quality & Risk Management Consultant The Doctors Company
P 5 Ways to Keep Diabetes Under Control See pg. 8
INDEX Legal Matters........................ pg.3 Oncology Research......... pg.5 Mental Health...................... pg.6 Healthy Heart....................... pg.8
5-Way Kidney Swap At Houston Methodist Hospital See pg. 11
hysicians have embraced smartphone technology, with the vast majority using phones to communicate via text messages and access medical information. The attraction is obvious: Smartphone applications place libraries full of information at users’ fingertips— including drug alerts (such as PDR. net) that are literally a click away. Texting via secure messaging systems is instantaneous, convenient, and direct. It reduces the time waiting for colleagues to call back and it can expedite patient care by facilitating the exchange of critical lab results and other necessary patient data. Smartphone technology is not just for peer-to-peer use: To manage their own healthcare needs, empowered patients are requesting more access to their physicians and medical records. Patients are also investing in mobile health technologies that provide continuous vital sign monitoring and generate health data that can be sent to their physicians. (For more information
on this topic, see our articles “Wearables Offer Wealth of Data During COVID-19, but Liability Risks Remain” and “Remote Patient Monitoring.”) Technology is becoming essential to the patient experience and increasingly important to younger, technology-savvy patients. Safeguard Against HIPAA Violations The very convenience that makes using smartphone technologies so inviting may also create privacy and security violations if messages containing protected health information (PHI) are not properly safeguarded. It is important that physicians and their teams understand that communications
between patients or other providers have the potential to lead to violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Physicians and other team members must not communicate with patients using their personal text messaging systems. Before communicating with patients through electronic technologies, a practice must have in place a secure HIPAA-compliant messaging platform that interfaces with the electronic health record (EHR) and strong administrative procedures. HIPAA compliance is paramount to the physician’s ability to communicate safely see HIPAA... page 14
Throughput at Freestanding and Hospital-Based Emergency Rooms
H
ealthcare experts are striving emergency rooms based on different to learn about emergency care measures of quality care and throughput. at freestanding and hospital-based A Baylor College of Medicine expert conducted a study on this to investigate how much time patients spend in freestanding emergency rooms compared to hospital-based emergency rooms. The findings were published in the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians Open. Researchers used the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance, a preexisting database containing information from hundreds of emergency rooms across the United States. They
pulled information from a combined 500 freestanding and low-volume hospital-based emergency rooms and compared metrics on length of stay, door-to-doctor time and how likely one is to be admitted to the hospital. Findings showed that if a see ER ... page 12
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