Hi everybody, welcome to Module 9.
Documentation of a patient's history,
their symptoms, diagnosis, treatment,
it's obviously essential to achieving
the highest possible quality of care.
This module reviews a broad range of issues
involving management of that information.
Patient records, medical records are important
for a lot of reasons,
mostly, they provide a comprehensive view
of the patient's medical history,
past diagnoses, treatments, test results.
This information is really critical for healthcare providers
to make informed decisions about a patient's care
and ensure a continuity of care
between providers and healthcare settings.
Helps our goals of providing quality care
by keeping detailed information
about a patient's health status,
about their medical history, about current conditions.
And this information helps providers
make more accurate diagnoses,
helps them choose appropriate treatments,
and monitor the effectiveness of interventions.
But patient records are also subject to various legal
and regulatory requirements.
There's privacy and security laws
and healthcare reporting requirements.
Accurate and complete patient records are essential
for compliance with these requirements
and help protect healthcare providers organizations
from legal and financial liability.
So those of you doing research,
and I believe a couple of you are,
also understand the patient records
are a valuable source for data, for public health
and for research and education.
By analyzing patient records
we can identify patterns and trends
in healthcare practices and outcomes.
Can use this information to improve quality
and effectiveness in healthcare.
And patient records can also be used
to engage patients in their own healthcare.
By providing patients with access to their medical records,
they can better understand their own health status,
track their progress,
and participate in that shared decision making process
with their healthcare providers and healthcare team.
Along with the importance of healthcare records
comes some dangers.
You know, what happens if we lose control
of a patient's healthcare records?
Who should we share those with?
Historically, these were all questions of privacy law
and you could see quite a bit of state by state variation.
Then we got the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act, or HIPAA,
as you've probably all heard of, in 1996,
which really changed everything in an attempt
to try to create consistency across the nation.
HIPAA has two main components
and you'll see some information about HIPAA this week.
One part is the Privacy Rule
and the other part is the Security Rule.
The Privacy Rule established kind of a national standard
for protecting the privacy and security
of individually identifiable health information.
That's called Protected Health Information.
This rule sets limits on the use
and disclosure of Public Health Information
and requires healthcare providers and other covered entities
to obtain patient consent before disclosing anything in PHI.
There are limited circumstances there are accepted,
such as treatment, payment, or operational.
The rule also requires covered entities
to provide patients with notices of their privacy rights
and the entity's privacy practices.
They have the Security Rule established national standards
for protecting electronic PHI,
how it's received, how it's transmitted,
how it's maintained by healthcare entities.
That rule requires entities to implement reasonable
and appropriate administrative, physical,
technical safeguards to the confidentiality, integrity
and availability of that electronic record.
HIPAA applies to covered entities,
so you probably have heard of that,
which includes healthcare providers,
health plans, healthcare clearinghouses
that transmit that health information electronically.
Business associates is another term you will see
such as third party billing companies
or medical transcriptionist.
Those entities, or people,
who perform functions on behalf of a covered entity
that involve the use or disclosure
of that public health information,
which is subject to HIPAA.
HIPAA violations can result
in significant financial penalties, reputational damage,
and it's important to follow the rules when you are able.
So this week we are going to look at
how privacy in healthcare has become a complex issue.
And we'll see a couple of examples of what happens
when things go pretty wrong.
So I will see you in the discussion board
and let's talk a little bit about healthcare privacy.