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Casa Grande Regional uses workforce categories, levels of access to comply with minimum necessary requirement

HIPAA Weekly Advisor, May 2, 2003

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The privacy rule's minimum necessary standard requires staff members to only use PHI necessary to do their jobs. Seventy-eight percent of subscribers who responded to our recent "Briefings on HIPAA" reader survey said they were either "very concerned" or "concerned" about the requirement, but it isn't as much of a concern for Rebecca Buegel, RHIA, privacy officer and director of health information management (HIM) at Casa Grande (AZ) Regional Medical Center.

"We found the requirement to be a problem as far as defining it in a policy and procedure, but not past that," says Buegel. "We have approximately 800 employees. From the moment people start their jobs here, they know what information they have a right to or need to access and what they don't. Defining it in writing was more difficult than the actuality."

The facility has always practiced an informal minimum necessary process when dealing with requests for copies of records, she says. "Just because [a physician] requests any and all information, we don't necessarily send everything. If they really want everything, we give it to them, but we try to determine whether that person really requires everything in the record or has lesser needs. I think it's something every medical records department has been doing for years."

Go to http://www.himinfo.com/news/feature.cfm?content_id=32792 to read more.

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