Tip #1: Maintaining Patient Confidentiality
Tip #2: Tracking Test Results
Tip #1: Maintaining Patient Confidentiality
The Risk:
Inadvertent breach of patient confidentiality.
Recommendations:
Office staff must be aware that routine office practices, such as discussing patient information within earshot of other patients, can breach patient confidentiality.
1. Educate your staff periodically to reinforce the need to maintain patient confidentiality and to never discuss patients outside the office.
2. Every year, have your staff sign a confidentiality agreement.
3. Assess your physical premises to determine the flow of patients through the office and how best to ensure that confidential patient information, written or spoken, is kept private.
4. Assess staff work areas to determine patients’ accessibility to computer screens and patient information. How quickly are computer users logged off the system when data entry stops?
5. Set up your office in such a way that staff conversations can not be overheard in the waiting area.
6. Obtain written consent from patients so that minimal information can be left on telephone answering machines.
Back to top
Tip #2: Tracking Test Results
The Risk:
Tests may not have been completed or results may be lost, overlooked, or not received.
Recommendations:
Follow-up procedures are important to ensure that patients receive the necessary testing, as ordered, and that results are returned to the office and properly reviewed.
1. Educate patients about the need for the testing, and document this conversation.
2. Implement a follow-up system in your practice to ensure that patients have undergone the recommended testing and that the results are returned to the office.
3. The follow-up system should include the patient’s name, the date the test was ordered, when the results were received, and when the patient was notified.
4. The physician should review, initial, and date the reports before they are filed in the medical record.
5. Attempts should be made to contact patients who have not undergone the recommended testing. These attempts should be documented in the medical record and, once the patient has been reached, he/she should again be urged to obtain the requested testing.
6. Include a process in your follow-up system to verify that consultations were obtained.
Back to top
|