Patient Communication: Part of the Medical Record, or not? Does Confidentiality Still Apply?

This advanced webinar provides an overview of medical records with a brief examination of what is or is not required for a health care practitioner to document.  Next, this webinar will discuss sources of medical record keeping requirements in addition to the usual state law sources of requirements for various health care professions.

We next focus on the whether and how HIPAA applies to the content of the record for a patient communication, and what constitutes patient communications – what are they and where do they come from, such as e-mails and texts?  The focus continues with reviewing HIPAA protections as applied to those e-mails and texts.

In addition, this webinar goes into detail about patient portals and the integration of the medical record with all information that may be flowing into and out of a patient portal from a health care provider.

Finally, we examine state laws with the perspective of whether the health care practitioner must include those patient communications in the patient’s medical record.  Even if the answer is no, should the health care provider include such patient communications in the patient’s medical record?  Is there a harm in not doing so?  Is there a harm in doing so, especially when medical records are so largely electronic, and saving a copy of an e-mail or a text seems easy?

Health care practitioners need to know the basic issues of medical records and patient communications so as to follow federal and state law, where applicable.  From years of the application of laws to medical records, reporting, and writing by the HHS, the remainder of the webinar will detail the top Frequently Asked Questions health care practitioners need to know.

Erase the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what specifically you need to know about the top issues of patient communications to be documented, or not, in the patient medical record, that health care practitioners face.

Webinar Objectives

This advanced webinar will answer the questions of whether patient communications are required to be in the patient medical record, whether required by state law or required by other sources of record keeping requirements.

Webinar Agenda

• What are patient communications?
• What sources of patient communications are there?
• How does HIPAA apply to patient communications?
• What are things required to be in a medical record?
• Even if the law does not mandate patient communications in a medical record, are there good reasons to include them, and if so, what reasons are there not to include them?

Webinar Highlights

• Overview of medical records content
• Sources of requirements for medical records content
• How HIPAA applies to patient communications
• What are patient communications and what sources are they from
• Patient portals and the information that flows in and out of them, is that part of the medical record
• Perspective of state laws that require inclusion of patient communications in the medical record
• Pros and cons of keeping patient communications in the medical record
• Top takeaways; helpful FAQs, and tips and techniques to avoid liability

Who Should Attend

Health care attorneys; corporate compliance officers in health care; medical records staff of medical offices and health care entities; hospital attorneys; health care practitioners who are covered entities; law enforcement officers in health care compliance; state boards and agencies with jurisdiction over state licenses to practice a health care profession