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Secure employee health information through ongoing training

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, February 20, 2004

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Some hospital staff are reluctant to go to their own facility for medical treatment. It's not uncommon for health care workers to be concerned that employers and colleagues could improperly access their health information.  While electronic safeguards such as passwords and codes certainly help protect systems from unauthorized access, they aren't necessarily enough. 

Training is crucial
Some facilities train staff annually on privacy and security issues, as well as ask each employee to sign a confidentiality statement. Eileen Bryant, health information management (HIM) director at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, agrees that frequent and consistent staff training is the best way to protect confidentiality of all medical records, including employees' records. "We schedule an HIM Awareness Week several times each year," she says. "The last one we held focused on employees as patients. All new employees are trained in confidentiality as an important part of their orientation . . . [and] sign confidentiality statements."

MGH also restricts access to employee patient records. "Whenever an employee becomes a patient, the chart gets a medical record number that is a restricted access code. A warning comes up on the computer system any time that record is accessed. We do the same thing for high-profile patients and any patient who requests that [his or her] name be kept out of the patient directory. When an employee accesses a record like this, he or she doesn't know whether it's a fellow employee or not." 

To read more on health information privacy, go to Briefings on HIPAA (BOH) (37328). The cost is $10. Subscribers to the online version of BOH have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their February issues. For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire February issue of BOH. Go to http://www.hcprolibrary.com/ContentSynopsis.cfm?type=pdf&content_type=1052&content_id=37325 to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. BOH online subscribers have free access to this issue, and print newsletter subscribers can find this issue in their mailboxes.

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