EMR Implementation & HITECH Act Blog

Using Social Media in a Medical Office? Be Careful!

Are you a health care professional working in a medical office?  Do you tweet? Friend? Text? Chat?  A recent post in a media-oriented blog got us thinking.  If your work life involves accessing or being around sensitive medical information normally associated with a medical office, you may want to reconsider how you use social media in relation to your practice.

With social media, it’s possible you may be inadvertently exposing yourself to the all-too-real risk of violating someone’s privacy.  You could easily run afoul of HIPAA regulations and rack up potentially huge  fines.   Here are a few questions to ask of yourself and your colleagues:

• Do you e-mail patients to confirm appointments or answer questions about their medical condition, treatments, etc.?  Are you sure those e-mails can’t be seen by someone other than your patient?
• Have you ever engaged in a “curbside consult” on Sermo or another social networking site in such a way that the patient could be identified by another party – known or unknown – to the discussion?
• Do you allow patients to become “friends” on facebook or to post pictures on your photo wall?

If you’re a health care professional working in a medical office and answered yes to any of these questions, you may be at risk.  Nothing you send electronically is ever truly private.   When you hit that send key, do you really know who will read what you wrote?   Always keep patient privacy in mind and monitor your facebook and other sites regularly to be sure nothing on them will violate confidentiality.  Remember…the reputation you save may be your own!

Rich Silverman
PCHS Blogging Team

Photo by Alton courtesy of Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free documentation License.

Posted by PC Healthstop Blogging Team