Q. Can paper patient records be kept in a public storage unit? The storage company we are considering has a digital entry at its main gate, and we would have a keyed lock on the storage unit door.
Privacy officers must ensure their hospital removes potential patient identifiers from data sets used for reasons outside of treatment, payment, and healthcare operations, privacy experts say.
When HIM professionals at Driscoll Children's Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, looked into its success rate for physician response to coding queries, it knew it needed to do a better job.
In October 2012, Medical Records Briefing (MRB) asked HIM managers and directors about their ICD-10 implementation efforts for our first quarterly benchmarking survey of the year.
It has been quite a year in the privacy world, hasn't it? The OCR website has reported 500 breaches of unsecured PHI affecting 500 or more individuals, totaling more than 12 million patients. There has been an increase in HIPAA-related criminal sentences involving jail time. And private lives are no longer private.
How quickly time flies! As 2012 has now come to an end, it seems to be a good time to reflect on some of the challenging standards hospitals faced this year.
