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Risk Management Tips: Maintaining Patient Confidentiality
The Tip:
Always maintain patient confidentiality.
The Risk:
It is a doctor’s responsibility to keep his or her patients’ medical information private. An inadvertent breach of patient confidentiality – where a third party becomes privy to this private medical information – can be problematic for a physician or a physician’s staff from both a legal and moral standpoint. A patient’s trust in his or her physician relies heavily on this assumed and protected confidential nature of the doctor-patient relationship.
Recommendations:
Office staff must be aware that routine office practices, such as discussing patient information within earshot of other patients, can breach patient confidentiality.
- Educate your staff periodically to reinforce the need to maintain patient confidentiality and to never discuss patients outside the office.
- Every year, have your staff sign a confidentiality agreement.
- 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.
- 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?
- Set up your office in such a way that staff conversations cannot be overheard in the waiting area.
- Obtain written consent from patients so that minimal information can be left on telephone answering machines.
