Why Would a Dentist Want Access to the Alberta Netcare Portal?

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Meghan in Blog

Why Would A Dentist Want Access To The Alberta Netcare Portal?

As a dentist or dental hygienist, if you have concerns about a patient’s health history, you may want to have access to the Alberta Netcare Portal to view the patient's history of health concerns and current medications.

Alberta Netcare provides personal health information that is available through a province-wide electronic record system under the authority of the Health Information Act (HIA).

Whether a dentist uses paper records, electronic dental records (EDR), or electronic medical records (EMR), using the Alberta Netcare Portal will help dentists monitor their patient’s interactions with other parts of the health care system.

What is the Alberta Netcare Portal?

Alberta Netcare Portal is the secure vehicle through which patient health information from a variety of health care providers is shared and accessed electronically, by independent and hospital-based health service providers like dentists, physicians, nurses and pharmacists. The Alberta Netcare Portal is a data collection centre for registries and systems such as laboratories, diagnostic imaging facilities, hospitals and some specialized clinics. Alberta Health and Wellness is the Netcare information manager.

Dentists and Dental Hygienists Are Custodians

Dentists were designated in 2010 as authorized custodians under the Health information Act (HIA). Dentists can now request access to Alberta Netcare by showing that they meet the Netcare requirements.

Dentists who manage patients with complex medical conditions or for the provision of treatment requiring sedation or general anaesthesia may require additional information about the patients’ health history. Dentists can use Alberta Netcare Portal to view medication profiles, laboratory data and tests results.

Ensuring reasonable safeguards to protect the privacy and security of personal health information of your patients and residents of Alberta is critical! We want everyone who has access to these health data repositories to follow the same best privacy and security practices. The HIA has regulated requirements for all custodians to follow.

Everyone needs to follow the rules to play in the sandbox!

How To Get Started

Before you are granted access to Alberta Netcare Portal, you must complete the following steps.

Step 1: Create or update your Health Information Management Privacy and Security Policies and Procedures including the rules governing the access, collection, use, of health information from Alberta Netcare.

Step 2: Complete a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) and submit this to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for review. For more information on how to complete a PIA, click here.

Step 3: Train your team on privacy awareness. I recommend the Privacy Awareness in Health Care Training — Dental Practices.

Step 4: Contact the eHealth Netcare Support Services Team.

Step 5: Complete a Provincial Organizational Readiness Assessment (pORA). See What is a pORA.

Step 6: Sign an Informational Manager Agreement (IMA) and Review Informational Exchange Protocol (IEP) with Alberta Netcare

For more tips on implementing reasonable privacy and security safeguards for your dental practice, see https://informationmanagers.ca/privacy-impact-assessment-pia/.

You can also watch the FAQ video on this topic by clicking the button below!

Watch the FAQ Video HERE!

You May Also Be Interested In:

What is a pORA?

New Health Information Policy and Procedure Manuals

Do You Need An Expedited Netcare Privacy Impact Assessment?

Who Is Doing the Recalls In Your Dental Practice?

Privacy Awareness in Healthcare Training: Dental Practices

Privacy Impact Assessment – Consultation Options Available!

When we know better, we can do better…

Jean Eaton is constructively obsessive about privacy, confidentiality, and security especially when it comes to the handling of personal health information. If you would like to discuss how I can help your practice, just send me an email. I am here to help you.

Jean L. Eaton
Your Practical Privacy Coach
INFORMATION MANAGERS

Alberta Netcare, ANP, dental hygienist, dentist, healthcare, PIA, PIA Consultant, privacy, Privacy Impact Assessment

What Is a pORA?

Posted on January 6, 2021 by Meghan in Blog

What Is A pORA?

The Provincial Organizational Readiness Assessment (pORA) document is a risk assessment tool that describes the technical, administrative, and physical security controls necessary to meet the minimum-security standards required by legislation and by Alberta Health.

When we provide our personal and sensitive information to a healthcare provider, we want assurances that the confidential information will be respected. We expect that our information will only be shared with people who need to know the information to provide health services to us. Alberta's Health Information Act (HIA) requires healthcare providers (custodians) to put appropriate safeguards in place to protect the privacy, confidentiality, and security of health information.

A completed pORA is one of the pre-requisites for community sites to access the Alberta Netcare Portal.

Alberta Netcare, known as the provincial Electronic Health Record (EHR), is a secure and confidential electronic system. It is accessible to health professionals and contains Albertans’ personal health information. This is also known as the Alberta Netcare Portal or ANP.

A pORA asks questions similar to the questions in a privacy impact assessment and is frequently completed at the same time as a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) when a new clinic is preparing to open. It's easy to get them confused, but they are separate documents and have separate purposes.

PIA

A Privacy Impact Assessment is a process that assists healthcare providers (custodians) to review the impact that an implementation of a new administrative practice, information system, or change to existing practices or systems relating to the collection, use and disclosure of individually identifying health information, may have on individual privacy. This includes how the clinic will ensure appropriate safeguards to ALL information sharing practices, including the use of Alberta Netcare.

In Alberta, a PIA must be submitted by the custodian to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) for review and acceptance.

pORA

This comprehensive risk assessment is required by Alberta Health to verify that a community healthcare provider custodian meets minimum security standards, before accessing provincial health information. It is one of the core requirements for access to the ANP and assists the custodian in meeting their legislative requirements and protect the privacy, confidentiality, and security of health information.

The pORA is submitted by the custodian to Alberta Netcare prior to access to Alberta Netcare Portal.
Prior to being granted access to Alberta Netcare Portal, the custodian must also have a PIA accepted by the OIPC.

We know that technology and office practices change over time. It is an expectation that the healthcare provider custodian will review their PIA, pORA, and supporting policies and procedures regularly, at least annually. Alberta Netcare requires that within two years from the date of approval of the pORA that its contents be thoroughly reviewed to ensure the information is correct and up-to-date.

For more information about pORA, see Alberta Netcare. Frequently Asked Questions. Provincial Organization Readiness Assessment. February 2020.

Watch the FAQ video here!

Did you enjoy this article? If you'd like to look at similar posts, visits these links:

Do You Need An Expedited Netcare Privacy Impact Assessment?

Alberta, Alberta Netcare, Alberta Netcare Portal, ANP, Health Information Act, HIA, Netcare, p-ORA, pORA, Privacy Impact Assessment, Provincial Organizational Readiness Assessment

Shared Health Record Project Includes Community Health Providers

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Jean Eaton in Blog, Guest Post

Are you a Community Healthcare Provider in Alberta?

The Alberta Netcare project, the provincial electronic health record (EHR), has been in development since 1999. The EHR is a secure and confidential electronic system of Alberta patient health information. The Shared Health Record Project is one of the latest Netcare initiatives.

One of the largest source of patient health information resides with community healthcare providers.

The Shared Health Record Project intends to provide the solution to integrate information from a healthcare providers' office based electronic medical record (EMR) into the provincial EHR to improve the communication between healthcare providers to better provide continuing care and treatment to the patient.

If you are a healthcare provider who believes that secure access to more patient health information can improve health outcomes, this article is for you!

In this guest author post, Lyuba Fleysher, Program Director, ConnectCare, provides an update of the Shared Health Record Project.

The primary goal of the Shared Health Record (SHR) Project is to establish a foundation for sharing clinical information between physician office electronic medical records (EMRs) and the Alberta Netcare EHR repositories managed by Alberta Health Services (AHS). The purpose of this integration is to support continuity of care and clinical decision-making.

It is well acknowledged that 70 to 80% of health services are delivered in community settings – outside of AHS programs and services. It was expected that provincial availability of information captured within physician office EMRs would support continuity of care and enhance patient safety by providing a more complete electronic health record (EHR).

The primary focus of SHR is on enabling system-to-system integration to access to information held in the Netcare EHR repositories managed by AHS and currently only available via the Netcare Portal.

Note this integration does not replace eDelivery of reports delivered to physicians who are named on the report.

The SHR implementation will:

Enable authorized users to search for, view, and download clinical documents (e.g. discharge summaries, consult reports, diagnostic imaging reports) and encounters via system-to-system messaging.
Include capabilities to automatically propagate report updates to providers who had downloaded and replicated copies of reports in their EMR (or paper chart) or requested receiving updates. The propagation of updates is to eliminate potential impact to patient safety of using incorrect or out-of-date information for clinical decision making.
Honor the patient’s expressed wishes for a Global Person-Level Mask (GPLM) and require users to provide a reason for unmasking the record if they wish to access a masked record.

The scope of the project includes implementation with a limited production rollout (LPR) of clinics that use the Alberta Qualified Services Provider (QSP) vendor – Microquest. However the SHR interface specifications will become an Alberta HISCA standard and be available for implementation with non-QSP (Alberta Qualified Services Provider) EMR vendors or other applications (e.g. Personal Health Portal).

The Shared Health Record (SHR) project is a key component of the Alberta Netcare Electronic Health Record (EHR). The SHR project is an initiative to further develop the value and completeness of the information shared within the provincial Netcare EHR, and enables further access to health information to support clinical decision making at the point of care.

The success of the Netcare EHR has been achieved by enabling access to demographic information, drug information, lab test result data, diagnostic imaging and other report information to physicians, pharmacists, hospitals, home care, and other health care professionals across the province. The goal of the next phase of the development of Netcare, as defined within the “Alberta Provincial Healthcare IM/IT Strategic Plan 2009-2015” , is to share relevant clinical information in addition to the information domains presently available within Netcare.

SHR is a concept that was developed by Canada Health Infoway. The Shared Health Record (SHR) is a mechanism for sharing person-specific clinically-relevant data not held in other domain repositories (e.g. DI, Lab, and Drug). The SHR is intended to hold a copy of subsets of information captured in the point of service (PoS) applications and should focus only on clinically relevant data appropriate for sharing. The following are types of information that Infoway suggests maybe included:

Basic Encounter Information
Referral Orders and Referral Notes
Encounter Summaries
Clinical Observations
Problems/Conditions/Diagnosis
Care Plans
Care Protocols
Health Status indicators

The SHR completed extensive consultation with stakeholders and established the following consensus:

The SHR should initially focus on Encounters, Reports, Immunizations/Adverse Reactions, Care Composition Profiles, Screenings and Alerts.
Both data integrity (accredited source, accuracy, timeliness) and presentation (the manner in which information is accessed from within the EHR) are paramount.
Conceptually, the SHR project should endeavor to allow the EHR to act as a “summary profile” which guides and points to client information supplied, managed and accredited by other distributed sources. This profile may be based on Client/Provider/Site Encounters.

Guest Author: Lyuba Fleysher, Program Director, ConnectCare, Alberta Netcare

For more information about the Shared Health Record, see: www.albertanetcare.ca/SharedHealthRecord.htm and www.ahs.ca/connectcare .

If you are using an EMR, contact your EMR representative to discover how the SHR integrates into your EMR.

Alberta, Alberta Netcare, Canada Health Infoway, health care, healthcare, shared health record