Guest Blog post by Tamara Beitel

Health Information Management Student, Centre for Distance Education, May 2015

Picture this, the reception room of the clinic was clean and organized, the patients were happy as they were quickly seen by an efficient, positive and qualified healthcare team. This is what happens when the clinic has taken the time to design their safeguards.

What are safeguards? Why are they important to you? How do you implement these safeguards into your clinic/office?

These are important questions to consider when thinking about safeguards. Implementing safeguards will make your clients/patients feel more confident that their personal information is safe. They will be more willing to share their information.

Why should you safeguard health information?

It is important to safeguard health information to protect your business, your reputation, and helps employees understand privacy, security and confidentiality. When your clients/patients see that you are actively making sure that their personal information is safe, they feel more confident in sharing that information knowing it will be protected.

What are safeguards?

There are three types of safeguards to use in maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of health information in your clinic.

Administrative safeguards are the policies and procedures and other written documents. Policies and procedures direct staff to properly access patient information, privacy training for staff, monitoring the policies and procedures, dealing with receiving and responding to privacy complaints and inquiries, and dealing with transferring, retaining and destroying personal information contained on electronic devices.

There is privacy breach management to help prevent or in case of a breach what the procedure is in dealing with the breach. In the blog, When is a privacy breach a privacy breach?, it discusses the repercussions of not implementing breach policies and also discusses the legislation that is in place to safeguard personal information from breaches. It is important to acknowledge when a breach has occurred, that you have taken the proper steps to address the breach, and have learned from the breach so as not to repeat the same mistakes.

Examples of Policies and Procedures:

• Signed oaths of confidentiality for all affiliates
• Screens should be private and not viewable from public areas
• Prohibit disclosure of patient diagnostic, treatment and care information over the phone, even to an individual who claims to be the patient

Technical Safeguards are controls that protect and control access to personally identifiable and health information. Technical safeguards include electronic devices, surveillance cameras, security systems, and telephone systems. Let’s focus on electronic health information and computer networks for example.

Audits of the security and computer systems are vital to maintain privacy and security of personal information. Through audits you can enforce compliance of the policies and procedures and see where changes, if any, are needed. It helps the staff to be aware of the importance in protecting the client/patient personal information. They see that there are consequences for not following policies and procedures.

You should also be aware of the risks from external threats. These include:

• identity theft
• loss of information
• information shared with unauthorized individuals
• Some examples of external threats are: malware (malicious software, designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system), spyware (a type of malware that collects information, such as key loggers), and irresponsible use of the Internet

Mitigation strategies include:

• regular training and refreshers on privacy and security
• IT professionals reassess any software/hardware additions/changes

Examples of technical safeguards in electronic medical records (EMRs) are:

• Strong passwords
• Encryption of data
• Using role-based access to limit access to health information to a need to know basis (user-based access rights ((secure)), role-based rights ((more secure)) and context-based rights ((most secure))

Physical Safeguards are the physical measures used to protect electronic health information from unauthorized access. This includes precautions to prevent break-ins, theft of computers and files, unauthorized access to personal information, applying physical barriers and control procedures against threats to personal information, and policies and procedures on locking up at night, computer etiquette, and office set up (how and where computers, fax machines etc. are set up).

Examples of physical safeguards are:

• Limiting access to the building, clinic and storage areas
• Alarms and security cameras, doors and locks, lighting
• Placing fax machines and printers out of sightline and reach of public areas

Safeguards Next Steps

All three of the safeguards should be used in conjunction with each other. The use of these safeguards will help protect your client/patient information from breach, identity theft, loss and unauthorized access. You have the power to make the clinic/office safe from threats to security, privacy and confidentiality. Your clients/patients will know that you have taken all reasonable steps to ensure that their personal information has been protected and appreciate it. It is beneficial to your clinic to review all of your safeguard measures with staff and have regular audits, reviews, updates to the policies and procedures, systems, and security of the clinic. There are many self-assessment tools available from the Privacy Commissioners in the provinces and from the federal government. See the resources below.

About the author: Tamara Beitel has successfully completed the Health Information Management Diploma at Centre for Distance Education, she is currently preparing to challenge the National Certification Exam in July 2015. Tamara is looking forward to work as a Certified Health Information Management (CHIM) professional in the area of policy and privacy protection in the Calgary area.

Resources

Alberta Medical Association, General Privacy Training, November 2013, https://www.albertadoctors.org/emr_resources/2013-11-06-GeneralPrivacyTraining.pdf

Jean Eaton, When is privacy breach a privacy breach? http://informationmanagers.ca/privacy-breach-privacy-breach/

Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, http://www.oipc.ab.ca/pages/home/default.aspx

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, https://www.priv.gc.ca/index e.asp