HIPAA was primarily penned to benefit consumers rather than healthcare organizations, yet the legislation itself is long, complicated and is not well understood by many patients and health plan members. There are four key aspects of HIPAA that make it important for patients: Privacy of health information, security of health data, notification of breaches of medical records, and the right to obtain copies of healthcare data.
The HIPAA Privacy Rule restricts the individuals who are able to view healthcare data and who healthcare data can be shared with without first obtaining permission from patients.
Generally speaking, access to health data is restricted to healthcare employees who need to view health and personal information in order to provide healthcare services and perform any administration duties. Healthcare organizations can only share PHI with business associates that perform for healthcare operations services on behalf of a covered entity that require access to PHI: Transcription service providers, payment processors, or mailing vendors for example. In such cases, those business associates must agree to keep data secure and the same rules apply for access and disclosures of PHI to other individuals or companies.
Any PHI provided must be limited to the minimum necessary amount to perform the specific services the business associate is contracted to perform. Permission must be obtained from patients before their PHI can be shared with companies for other reasons, including research and marketing. The Privacy Rule also allows patients to designate which individuals are permitted to obtain their health data on behalf of patients — friends, family, or caregivers for instance. You will be aware of the latest threat profiles and you will have the best security updates to ensure your servers and systems will always be protected.
Worldwide Monitoring It is very possible that a breach can occur on your servers and systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and days out of the year. Your healthcare facilities should be equipped with the latest security tools that will keep track of everything and review everything that will occur on your facilities devices as they are occurring. Alerts It can be very time-consuming and frustrating to single out threats and vulnerabilities that could be in your network.
When you use a HIPAA compliant solutions, you will have constant scanning on your servers that will detect any activity that seems suspicious. Security analysts will be able to detect any threats and fix them before they have an impact on patient medical records.
Ensuring you are HIPAA compliant is certainly not an easy task, but this is the reason why so many medical providers seek the solutions of a provider. If you want your practice to be protected and if you want your patients to enjoy the benefits of having protection over their medical records, it is time to make sure you are HIPAA compliant. Whether in work or in life, you want to be judged by your abilities—not by your illnesses or chronic conditions.
Ignorance can cause people to have misguided ideas about sicknesses. And their fears and negative stereotypes can have a negative impact on you. Trust is everything in healthcare. On a larger scale, when the medical community is trusted, the public is more willing to participate in research studies and healthcare campaigns that can prevent the spread of certain illnesses. Would you be willing to recommend a doctor that had betrayed your trust? Would you leave that doctor a good review online or speak highly of them in the community?
But on the other hand, you probably would recommend a doctor that values patient confidentiality. Trust builds relationships, which in turn, builds a reputation. If doctors can be trusted, they can build good relationships with their patients and also preserve their reputations—not just in their local communities but in the medical community as well.
Violations of the HIPAA law can result in steep financial penalties or imprisonment, not to mention a ruined reputation and career. Patient confidentiality is important for both patients and doctors, and it preserves the integrity of the medical community. Joy and sadness can be commonly juxtaposed in the ED of a maternity unit, making it a unique setting where privacy is of particular importance.
The Irish Standards for Bereavement Care following Pregnancy Loss and Perinatal Death, published in advocate patient-centred care and recommend that hospitals facilitate access to spaces where delivering bad news and bereavement care can take place in a quiet, comfortable environment, where privacy is ensured [ 9 ].
In our hospital, it was recognised that ED presentations were a significant source of patient complaints and that a significant portion of these complaints were related to lack of privacy and confidentiality. A previous study from our hospital, which focused on patient experiences of miscarriage, highlighted how negative experiences were often related to the physical design of the hospital [ 10 ].
These participants felt that the physical space where they were cared for in the ED heightened their distress [ 10 ]. We aimed to examine if changing the physical layout of the maternity ED, with some simple refurbishments, would improve the patient experience of privacy and confidentiality. Cork University Maternity Hospital CUMH is a university teaching tertiary referral maternity hospital in the south of Ireland where over babies are delivered annually.
Maternity care in this hospital is consultant-led but involves a multi-disciplinary team including non-consultant hospital doctors, midwives, physiotherapists, chaplains and care assistants. The ED at CUMH is a h service, and is the first point of access for all women utilising the services of the hospital.
There are approximately 17, attendances in the ED annually and this comprises early pregnancy, antenatal, postnatal and gynaecology patients. Originally, the physical layout of the CUMH ED afforded no partitioning for women attending, with only a curtain separating each of the five trolley bays in the unit. In a decision was made to improve the CUMH ED layout, as it was realised that privacy and confidentiality was compromised by its physical design.
Figure 1 contains photographs from before and after the refurbishment project. Photographs of the ER at Cork University Maternity hospital before and after a refurbishment project which was undertaken to achieve a more private and suitable space in which to care for patients.
Top right and left: pre- renovations. Bottom left and right: post-renovations. Our study was questionnaire-based and asked women specific questions about their perception of privacy and confidentiality during their assessment in the ED.
The survey, which is displayed in Additional file 1 , was created by the authors, specifically developed for this study and based on previously published literature for the general ED setting.
Olsen et. We elaborated on these questions in our questionnaire and created questions appropriate for a maternity setting and for our specific hospital environment.
Women were asked:. Finally, women were asked to comment on whether or not they deemed their privacy to be adequate and given the opportunity to comment on anything in particular that they saw or heard which upset them during the time that they were in the ED. Tables within the results section contain a sample of these comments which were chosen by the authors as they best illustrate the themes being presented.
Informed verbal consent was obtained from participants following approval from the local ethics committee in CUMH. Verbal consent was deemed to be appropriate as the surveys were completely anonymous with no patient identifiable details. Patients were under no obligation to complete the surveys if they did not wish to partake in the study.
Women were asked to complete an anonymous survey during a visit to the ED over a 4 week period before the refurbishment project took place. Then, some weeks after the refurbished unit opened, a separate group of women were surveyed using the same questionnaire.
The latter took place over another 4 week period. All healthcare staff who work in the ED were educated about the study, were familiar with the survey and agreed to distribute it to patients during their attendance or immediately prior to discharge from the ED. Staff were asked to randomly select patients to participate both during the day and night.
The surveys were in paper format and were handed directly to patients by midwives and doctors working in the ED. Participants were asked to place their completed surveys in a sealed letter box when they were leaving the ED having either been admitted to the ward or discharged home. A number of patients would have been deemed ineligible to participate, for example, a patient who was very upset following the diagnosis of a stillbirth or in the setting of a collapse. Staff used their own discretion as to who it was inappropriate to approach.
Following collection of the surveys, data were inputted and analysed using SPSS version The pre- and post-intervention surveys were analysed separately using descriptive statistics.
The differences between pre- and post-intervention surveys were then compared using Chi-square tests. Qualitative data were collected from the open-ended questions to identify themes and sub-themes.
For the purposes of this study, we took an idiographic approach which meant that themes emerged from the data as it was analysed. Analysis took place in phases- we firstly familiarised ourselves with the data, then we searched for initial sub-themes and finally defined and named our themes. Given the number of transcripts that needed to be managed for this analysis it was agreed that software for analysis was not necessary.
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