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Privacy Practice Review

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Jean Eaton in Clinic Manager / Privacy Officer, Established Practice, Services, Vendor

Demonstrate and ensure compliance to your privacy goals. A Privacy Review is an educational and consultative program that serves as a vehicle to identify best practices as well as opportunities for improvement.

Your medical office wants to promote a culture of respect for privacy and information security throughout the organization when providing patient care and accessing and disclosing protected health information.

To demonstrate and ensure continuing compliance to your privacy goals, a Privacy Review, is an educational and consultative program that serves as a vehicle to identify best practices as well as opportunities for improvement.

The Privacy Review is designed to be transparent in order to maximize the opportunity to impart knowledge and effect change.

Each review presents an opportunity to give members of your staff the information and tools that they need to protect patient privacy.

healthcare, Netcare, privacy compliance, reasonable safeguards, security compliance

Is Your Email Secure?

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Jean Eaton in Blog

Mon, 08/19/2013 – 09:07 — jean

Is your email secure? Backed up? If you suddenly lose your email, calendar, or contact list, this could either be a speed bump in your busy day, or a nightmare that may take days or weeks and a lot of money to recover.

If you use email as temporary communications or your primary method of business, it needs to be managed securely. When you or your staff use email from multiple devices – such as your desktop computer, smart phone, or website – you have additional privacy and security requirements.

Many small businesses have purchased an email software system like Outlook as part of their desktop software. Unfortunately, recent software updates from Microsoft do not include Outlook; you are encouraged instead to purchase MS Office 365 software where all of your email is stored on the MS Cloud.

Some businesses use free email accounts – like gmail or yahoo – where emails, calendars, and contact information is on the public cloud. It is accessible from any internet connection but is difficult to back up to a local device that you can control.
If you use email to transact business – employee records, business contacts, company newsletters, subscriptions, financial or consumer purchases, or personally identifying messaging – you need to meet privacy and security requirements.

Previous versions of Windows Server Small Business Server (SBS) edition included Microsoft Exchange so small businesses could create their own in-house email server. This is not included in Windows Server 2012 Essential (SBS replacement). But small businesses still have a few options:

Buy the Microsoft Exchange Server full licenses, although it can be quite expensive
Sign up to Office 365 which is a hosted / cloud based Microsoft Exchange service from Microsoft with email hosted in the USA. Offices will need to determine their level of risk using personally identifiable information in emails – including sensitive information like credit card, payroll, health information, and other sensitive content – which will be stored out of Canada and subject to US legislation and uses.
Contract with a Canadian hosted Microsoft Exchange service with a Canadian based cloud service provider. This might be a cost effective solution and permit full access to email in an environment which is backed up and more easily accessible.

There are many features offered with a hosted email service:

Collaboration is easy as you have access to group calendaring and scheduling, shared contacts, folders and calendars, tasks and task delegation, as well as public email folders.
Fully functional email software.
Sync capabilities to your smart phone without worrying about viruses, spam, or malware, and mail archiving is automatic. Store as much or as little email as you need and do so without dealing with annoying ads.
Anti-phishing, anti-virus, and malware software are attached to each email connection.
No data ‘left behind' on the device – all data is securely maintained in the hosted email. If a mobile device is lost or stolen, business email is not compromised.

You can apply business rules – for example, emails can be prevented from being forwarded to an employee's home gmail account. Employees can securely work from home.
All business data is maintained by the business. So if your employee wins the lottery and doesn't come back to work, all business emails have been maintained in the hosted email and not on an employee's home computer.
Data is encrypted during the internet transmission.

To get a Hosted Email, you will need internet access with a data plan. You can continue to use your desktop computer and its cable internet access. When you use mobile devices, you can use your mobile provider data plan (Rogers, Bell, Telus, etc), or connect to a trusted WiFi connection.

You are still responsible for good security practices at your location including:

Unique user ID and password on your computer network – including mobile devices – and
Good password management – complex passwords that are changed regularly
Physical safeguards to ensure that your work locations – including mobile locations – are secure from theft

Common sense awareness – don't open suspicious phishing or spam emails

Business-class Microsoft Exchange email hosting services mean you're always in touch and up-to-date, in the office or on the road accessing your mobile email.

Things to look for in a hosted email solution vendor:

Canadian provider with data centres only in Canada (Alberta preferable)
Reputable company with proven track record
Contract including:
Termination clause – when the contract terminates, the vendor will:
Notify you in advance of termination
Allow local back up of your data or data transfer
Validate that your data has been completely and securely deleted from the data centre
Encrypted at the data centre – no one at the data centre can read your information and it is secure from someone else hacking into the data centre to steal your data

Confirm your backup plan for your email accounts.  If you don't have one, create a plan.

INFORMATION MANAGERS
We are an information management company based in Edmonton, Alberta. We specialize in health information management, records management, practice efficiency and workflow consultation as well as privacy and security in the Health Care sector.
We take care of the elephant in the room.

Alberta, backup, best practice, breach, business associate, cloud service provider, computer network, email, external hard drive backup, health information, healthcare, hosted email solution vendor, privacy, SBS, security, Windows Small Business Server

It’s Tax Time! Are you ready?

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Jean Eaton in Blog

Practice Pro-Active Privacy!

It will soon be tax time. If your clinic provides services where patients pay for non-insured services, you may provide a consolidated fees report to the patient. However, you may only provide health information to the patient or to the individual that the patient authorizes. Instead of having to explain this over and over again, find a creative, pro-active method to inform your patients. Use a poster or your website or existing closed circuit TV to show common examples of how your office handles routine requests for information.

Download a sample poster and consent form from our website!  Tax Poster

Tax Poster

1Pd_Consent DisclosureTax

education, healthcare, patient release of information, privacy, privacy by design, privacy poster, Pro-active privacy, templates

Family Care Clinics in Alberta

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Jean Eaton in Blog

On April 2, family care clinics will open in Edmonton at the East Edmonton Health Centre and in Calgary at the East Calgary Health Centre. On April 16, the third clinic will open at the Associate Medical Clinic building in Slave Lake.

What is a family care clinic?

A family care clinic provides individual and family-focused primary health care programs and services that emphasize wellness as well as chronic disease prevention and management – all under one roof. Clinics will be staffed by teams of health care providers such as:

  • nurse practitioners (NPs);
  • registered nurses (RNs);
  • licensed practical nurses (LPNs);
  • counselors;
  • dietitians;
  • physical therapists (PTs);
  • pharmacists; and
  • family physicians.

See the Government of Alberta News Release.

On Monday, April 2, PC Leader Alison Redford announced in Strathmore that a re-elected Progressive Conservative government would create 140 family care clinics across Alberta over three years. (See Edmonton Journal article April 2, 2012)

In the Edmonton Journal article, the Alberta Medical Association president Dr. Linda Slocombe commented on her concerns about how these family care clinics will be funded, and how they will integrate with already established primary care networks — which operate on a similar but not identical model.

Alberta, Family Care Clinic, healthcare
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“This was my first ever time I had to work on a PIA and I was a little nervous about doing it efficiently - but you really made it as simple and straight forward as possible. Thank you for being available for my questions when I had them. I would easily recommend Privacy Impact Assessments to Protect Your Practice course for anyone to do their own PIA's! Thank you so much!”

- Karen Sarabura, Clinic Manager and Privacy Officer, CGA Medical Imaging, Alberta

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