Nacole is a HIPAA Privacy Coordinator with ProHealth Care in Waukesha, WI. Her main responsibility is to ensure that patients’ medical health records remain private. To accomplish this, Nacole is running daily reports to monitor irregular access to the database and then following up with in-person staff interviews and preparing hand-offs for the appropriate coarse of action.
Transcript
My name is Nacole Scheckel, and I'm the Privacy Coordinator for ProHealth Care. My role is to help uphold the privacy policy for our organization. And so the way that I do that is I monitor our electronic health record, and I have a program that helps me do that. I have reports that run every day, and I review those every morning, to find out if there's possible inappropriate access into Epic. Every organization has their own rules and regulations. Ours, you're not able to look into your own record, access your own record in Epic. You also cannot access, just freely access, a neighbor, co-worker, a friend or family if you're just curious. You saw them in the hospital and you wanna know why they're there, and you just go into Epic and look. And that's against our policy. So it's very important that I do the background work and make sure that their accesses fall within a workflow for them, or a business need. So I will call their leader first, after I see the report I'll call the leader and ask the leader if they think that it's possible that it was within a business need for them to have accessed the record. If the leader doesn't think so, then I'll meet with the leader, the employee and HR. And I will explain the report to the employee and hear what their answers are. And then from that from what their answers are then we decide what actions will be taken. And it's all dependent upon the privacy policy that we have and the sanctions within it. My hours are 7:30 to 4:00, but if I need to interview an employee before or after I will do that. I'll make accommodations for that. Doing my research, my investigation, talking to the employee if needed, and then writing my report, handing it off to HR, and then having the final resolution, takes about a week.
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