BIG SAVINGS #1
Other Notices Are Incomplete
By law, HIPAA Notices must include a summary of the laws in your state that
preempt Federal privacy regulations. No other company offers Notices that include
this element, and HIPAA says it has to be there. This means it’s up to
you to pay an attorney to analyze your state’s regulations and write
up a summary for your notices. At HIPAAeasy our lawyers have done that for
you.
(As with all legal documents, you’ll want to show our Notices to your
attorney, but a quick read-through by your attorney will cost you significantly
less than if you had to buy a state preemption analysis and summary from him.)
BIG SAVINGS #2
You Aren’t In The Printing Business, Are
You?
With disk-based you-print-‘em HIPAA solutions, you have to enter all
the personalized information about your practice, and then you have to print
them. (And you still have to buy that expensive State Preemption Analysis from
your lawyer. See above.)
Our notices cost less than if you got them done at the local copy shop, less
than if you do them on your in-house copier, a whole lot less if you want serialized
numbering on the notices and receipts. Print them up in your spare time (which
you and your staff have lots of, no?) and all you get is an unprofessional-looking
black-and-white photocopy, or more likely after a while a photocopy of a photocopy
of a photocopy.
Again: HIPAAeasy’s Notice of Privacy Practice costs less, looks a lot
better, and saves you a lot of time over solutions where you have to do the
personalizing and printing.
BIG SAVINGS #3
But Officer, We Meant to Comply
You have to give out a Notice of Privacy Practice, but
there’s a lot
more to compliance. HIPAA is very specific about your responsibilities:
• You must document the receipt
of the Notice
by your patient,
• You must document their special
privacy requests,
• You must keep track of those
special privacy requests
• You must document any instance
where you refuse to comply with those requests, along with any requests
for review of
refusal by the patient
and on and on and on,
• You must log disclosures
of Protected Health Information, and your Business Associates must do the
same, and it’s up to you to see that they
do.
Face it, compliance could get very messy very quickly. Just keeping track of
the special requests will get appallingly complicated if you don’t
have a system in place. Non-compliance is a very expensive proposition, especially
with an angry patient on your hands. (Example: You have a patient who has
a
very good reason for not wanting you to send appointment reminders to his
home, so he formally requests that you only send them to his office. Your
life will
be so much easier if you and your staff always comply with this request.)
The easy-to-implement HIPAAeasy System brings order to this complicated situation.
Ready to use right out of the box,
• The HIPAAeasy System alerts the staff when a patient hasn’t
received a Notice yet,
• The HIPAAeasy System alerts
the staff when a patient has made special privacy requests,
• And then the HIPAAeasy System
makes it easy for the staff to know what they need to do to comply.
The HIPAAeasy System forms also bring order to your documentation responsibilities.
When necessary they include clear instructions for your patients, making for
fewer time-consuming misunderstandings.
Here’s something you probably haven’t thought of: when disputes
arise, and you know they will, the fact that you employ an orderly, uniform
system like ours will demonstrate that you are making a strong effort to comply
with both the regulations and your patient’s requests. A few random
sheets of white paper scattered through a chart may not demonstrate the same
keen
intent. The courts often smile favorably on strong efforts.
BIG SAVINGS #4
But We Depended On Them To Keep Good Records.
As we mentioned
above, it’s now up to you to log disclosures of Protected
Health Information (PHI), and your Business Associates must do the same,
and it’s up to you to see that they do.
Doing your own logging seems pretty reasonable. However, in order to be
sure that your business associates (such as billing services, labs, accountants,
etc.) document and log any disclosures of PHI of your patients, you have
to obtain a signed agreement with them that they will actually comply
with
this
HIPAA requirement.
We’re not the only company out there selling Business Associate Agreements
(BAA). However, our BAA contains a unique requirement that we haven’t
seen in any other BAA. While other BAA’s require your business associates
to log PHI disclosures and supply them to you on demand, our agreement requires
that your BA’s inform you at the time of disclosure.
It’s your responsibility to produce this documentation on demand, and
your peril if you can’t. Why would you want to trust that someone
else is doing this for you? Our BAA requires that your business associates
keep
you (and your records) up-to-date. (This makes their own compliance far
more likely in the first place.)
Say five years from now one of your patients demands an accounting of
PHI disclosures from your practice and from your business associates.
(They
can actually demand
disclosures going back six years, after April 14, 2003.) If you don’t
have disclosure documentation from your business associates on hand already,
you have to actually go to all your business associates (even the ones you
don’t work with anymore) and get them to go through their records to
find PHI disclosure documentation, and you have to hope that they actually
complied with the conditions they agreed to through the years. It’s
going to be expensive for you whether they have this documentation or
not.
Only HIPAAeasy saves you this possibly substantial expense – because
we thought of requiring your business associates to send you documentation
at the time of disclosure.
We can help you decide WHICH HIPAAeasy
System kit is right for you.
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