As an employer and health care provider, you are responsible to provide training to all of your employees about privacy awareness. If you don’t provide the training, if the employees don’t understand the policies and there is a privacy breach, then the healthcare provider is more likely to be held accountable under the legislation and face penalties including fines and even prison!

Protect your organization and your patients. Equip your staff with the information they need to confidently and correctly handle personal health information. Healthcare businesses who want employee and supervisor level privacy awareness training to support key policies, procedures and risk management programs need a privacy awareness training program.

How do you keep privacy active in the minds of your clinic staff?

Below are a number of simple, low-cost tips that you can use right away to build privacy awareness training in your practice.

Start a privacy awareness training program

The super-easy way to start a simple privacy awareness training program in your organization is to start with your Health Information Privacy and Security Policies and Procedures Manual. Take one policy or procedure a week or month, circulate it for review, and then circulate a short follow-up quiz specific to your organization.

If you circulate the quiz by email, depending on which email service you use, you may be able to use the built-in poll feature. You send out the question and in the poll, your team replies with the best answer. That way, you also build in a way to document that people received and responded to your quiz.

Listen to podcasts or watch YouTube videos on privacy awareness during a team meeting

Practice Management Nuggets For Your Healthcare Practice is a regular interview series with practice managers, healthcare providers, or trusted vendors who support healthcare practices. Topics include things you need to know to help you start, grow, fix, or maintain your healthcare practice. The events will be short – about 30 minutes – with nuggets of information that you can use right away. You can listen to these interviews as a podcast or watch them on YouTube.

Recent training topics have included:

• Remote Working Privacy Breach Pain
• PIPEDA's Mandatory Privacy Breach Notification
• Privacy Awareness Quiz #PrivacyMatters

Take a Privacy Awareness Training course as a team

Regular privacy awareness training protects patients, employees, and your business.

Privacy Awareness in Healthcare Online Training and Privacy Awareness in Health Care Training – Dental Practices are online courses offered by Corridor Interactive.

In the course best fit for your practice, you and your staff will learn:

• Understand patient and client privacy rights.
• Respect personal health information and your obligations.
• Confidently and correctly handle personal health information.
• Use reasonable safeguards to protect personal health information (PHI).
• Recognize and respond to a privacy breach
• Support key policies, procedures and risk management programs in your healthcare practice.

Become a Practice Management Success member

Practice Management Success is an online community with tips, tools, and templates you can use right away to start, grow, fix, or maintain your healthcare practice. Membership is open to all healthcare practices of any size. Members have access to online resources and networking and support from other clinic managers, practice managers, and healthcare providers in independent community practices!

When you are a member of Practice Management Success, you also have access to the Q&A With Jean training library.Use these privacy awareness training videos where you can select the topics that are of interest to your practice. Each Q&A recording includes training (usually 10-30 minutes), and most have training notes or resources that you can download and use right away.

Members also have access to Policy and Procedure Orientation For Your Employees training videos.

Subscribe to Privacy Nuggets Newsletter

Privacy Nuggets are posted on the Information Managers blog and also sent to you by email when you subscribe to the Privacy Nuggets newsletter. These articles explore recent privacy breaches and provide a training tip on how to prevent a similar breach from happening in your practice and tips on how to respond to a similar privacy breach incident. You are welcome to share the articles and emails with your team and use this as a training tool, too!

Recent articles include:

• 3 Parts to Every Privacy Awareness Training
• Recent Privacy Breach Convictions Under Alberta's Health Information Act
• When is a Privacy Breach a Privacy Breach?

CyberSecurity Awareness Month

The line between our online and offline lives is indistinguishable. In these tech-fueled times, our homes, societal well-being, economic prosperity and nation’s security are impacted by the internet.

The overarching theme for Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2020 is “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart.” The theme empowers individuals and organizations to own their role in protecting their part of cyberspace, with a particular emphasis on the key message for 2020: “If you connect it, protect it.”  If everyone does their part – implementing stronger security practices, raising community awareness, educating vulnerable audiences or training employees – our interconnected world will be safer and more resilient for everyone. 

Information Managers Ltd has been a Cyber Security Champion for many years – and now you can, too!

Cyber Security Awareness Month was launched by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) & the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in October 2004. This US organization sponsors a multi-media resource campaign each October.

Become a Champion

You can become a Champion, too – and get direct access to all the resources.

• Demonstrate to team the importance of cyber security at work.
• Share with your patients – by posters in your practice, blog posts, or your email newsletters – and demonstrate that your practice is cyber aware and you want to share tips with them.
• If you have team members who work remotely, work from home, use their own mobile devices, or use the internet to connect with apps and resources – give them additional skills to do their work as safely as possible.
• Help your team members better manage their own personal information in their personal lives – good habits that will help them at work, too!

Becoming a Champion is easy and does not require any financial support. Become a Champion here https://staysafeonline.org/ncsam/champions/.

Throughout October, NCSA will focus on the following areas in our promotions and outreach. Partners are welcome to follow along with NCSA but also encouraged to create their own areas of focus relevant to their organization:

There is a #BeCyberSmart theme for each week in October.

October 1 and 2: Official kick-off for the month

Week of October 5 (Week 1): If You Connect It, Protect It

Week of October 12 (Week 2): Securing Devices at Home and Work

Week of October 19 (Week 3): Securing Internet-Connected Devices in Healthcare

Week of October 26 (Week 4): The Future of Connected Devices

Watch for resources from Information Managers during Cyber Security Month.