The Bureaucracy is Stifling

About a week ago a new resident with dementia moved into one of our our assisted living homes. Her family wanted us to meet with her psychiatrist via Zoom to go over her treatment plan and how we would take care of her.

The meeting was supposed to be a couple of days ago. I say ‘supposed to be’ because it never happened.

A couple of hours prior to the meeting, the psychiatrist asked the family for all the credentials of everyone who will attend the meeting other then the resident and her family.

It was an odd request in my opinion.  I obliged by sending the psychiatrist my credentials and my manager’s credentials. We are both certified assisted living managers.

Then I drove over to the home to be on the Zoom call with the family, my manager and the resident.

The psychologist starts the call by informing all of us (including the family of the resident) that she doesn’t have a release and so cannot talk to my manager or me about the resident’s condition.

Even though they will be under our care. Even though the family (including the power-of attorney) was right there on the Zoom call.

The psychiatrist was worried that she might be violating the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) act. Although I am not a lawyer, as far as I can tell, she was not. HIPAA allows medical providers to share information with care facilities without a release to do so.

Nevertheless it is amazing how secretive we all have to be about medical information.

We cannot send any patient information to a doctor through email or text message. We can use faxes because they allegedly cannot be hacked. However, the fax machine must be in a secure location and a fax cover sheet with a HIPAA disclosure must be used.

Fines can be excessive for disclosing any patient information.

• A clinic received a $750,000 fine for hiring a vendor to harvest silver from old x-rays without first signing a business confidentiality agreement.

• If you don’t know you’re breaking a HIPAA rule, you can still be fined up to $50,000

• A Telehealth business was fined $1.5 million for storing patient videos on unsecured servers. There were no hacks or leaks of patient information

I’m all for the confidentiality of patient records. We all don’t want our health issues to become public information.

Yet sometimes it seems like we go too far.

I can feel the unwillingness to talk about patient conditions in many healthcare providers. It seems like healthcare is a profession where we can all benefit by talking about treatments for different conditions.

Figuring out what worked and what didn’t work.

Yet it can be a violation if you talk about someone’s condition even if you don’t say their name. If you mention something that might identify them, you can be fined.

Fortunately a lot of our residents or their Power’s of Attorney sign a waiver letting us tell others about their success stories.

It just seems like there could be a middle ground where we can help each other without violating privacy protections.