The COVID-19 pandemic impacts each of us.

When we work together, we will get through these unprecedented changes to our lives and our practices.

Use these policy and procedure and  PIA templates to help you provide virtual care while remote working and maintain reasonable safeguards to protect the privacy and security of personal health information.

Privacy Impact Assessment Templates for Virtual Care and Remote Working

If your healthcare practice is implementing remote working or virtual healthcare, you need to notify the OIPC.

Health information is sensitive information. Reasonable efforts must be made to ensure that identifying and sensitive information is protected from unauthorized access, loss, or damage during and outside work hours. What a custodian may consider to be reasonable efforts during a pandemic may be different than reasonable efforts during normal circumstances.

In Alberta, section 64 of the Health Information Act (HIA) requires custodians to prepare a privacy impact assessment (PIA) and submit it to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) of Alberta prior to implementing a new administrative or technical process in a healthcare practice.

The OIPC in Alberta requests in its notice of March 19, 2020, that custodians notify the Commissioner about new administrative practices or information systems.

How Do I Notify The OIPC?

If you have implemented, or plan to soon implement remote working, virtual care or other administrative or technical changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, send an email to the OIPC to inform them, in general terms, about your plans.

How Do I Do a Privacy Impact Assessment?

As soon as possible, submit a project specific Privacy Impact Assessment to the OIPC.

If you have a previously submitted Privacy Impact Assessment, you can complete a project specific Privacy Impact Assessment now.

I’m here to help you.

I’ve prepared a Privacy Impact Assessment template package to help you complete your Privacy Impact Assessment.

These policies and procedures templates will help every clinician thinking of authorizing some (or all) of your staff to remote work from home and / or provide virtual care while ensuring the privacy and security of health information.

The templates will also help you to prepare your project specific Privacy Impact Assessment to demonstrate that you are meeting the reasonable safeguards to protect the privacy, confidentiality, and security of patients’ health information.

If you are a custodian (including physician,  pharmacist, dentist, chiropractor and more!) in Alberta, you must submit your PIA to the OIPC. Use these templates to make this easier and faster than you thought possible!

The custodian must respond to any questions from the OIPC. Using the templates does not guarantee that the procedures and technology that you implement in your practice is secure or that the OIPC will accept your Privacy Impact Assessment.

Pricing

The COVID-19 pandemic impacts each of us.

When we work together, we will get through these unprecedented changes to our lives and our practices.

I’ve created these templates to help you respond as quickly as possible while maintaining reasonable safeguards.

I think that these templates provide great value. Ordinarily, you may pay a consulting fee of over $500.

I’m making these available to you at a one-time cost of $75.

I want to help you to have written procedures and strategies to offer virtual care to your patients and remote working options to your employees and take reasonable steps to ensure privacy, confidentiality, and security of personal health information.