Privacy Matters

When a patient visits your practice, the last thing they want to worry about is the security of their protected health information (PHI). While the best safeguard against releasing such information is enforcing strict PHI management procedures within your practice, many technological options are available to help you.

Start with simple fixes
Most of us realize that we need to maintain virus protection on our personal PCs, but are you making sure that this simple step is in place on all computers within your practice? Running periodic system checks with your virus protection software on your office’s PCs can help identify and correct security issues before they become major problems.

Making sure that every staff member within your practice has a unique username and login is a simple step that may often be overlooked. Not only does this allow you the capability of locking out a staffer that may have left your practice, but some software systems can utilize a user’s unique login credentials to create an audit trail.

You may also want to implement password requirements such as requiring numeric and/or special symbols to make passwords more difficult to break. Requiring employees to update passwords on a regular basis can also prevent security breaches.

Can you see what I see?
Perhaps you would like to communicate with patients via email to share lab test results, action plans or other important information. However, since email systems are not truly private you should consider options such as providing PHI messaging through a password-protected website.

The Intergy Practice Portal allows your practice to send secure messages to patients that have subscribed to the service. All message content is stored and viewed completely on a secure, password-protected website. Notification messages are emailed to the patients’ email account alerting them to log in to your practice's website to read the details. Then messages your patients send you are directed to your Intergy by Sage or Intergy EHR by Sage account for next steps.

Privacy within practice management
Make sure that you know and understand how to use any privacy features within your existing software systems such as your practice management and/or Electronic Health Record (EHR) system.

For instance, the Patient Privacy feature within Intergy enables your practice to easily track authorization and disclosure of sensitive data. A “Privacy” page within each patient account enables you to track information concerning the use and release of their PHI for reasons such as treatment, payment or operations (TPO) such as consent, authorization, disclosure, confidential patient statuses and advance directives.

Patient authorizations and government requests for disclosure
Under certain rules, a signed authorization from the patient or patient’s representative or a request from a government agency is necessary when PHI is to be disclosed to a third party or used by a practice for purposes other than TPO. The Patient Privacy feature within Intergy enables your practice to record, track and report these authorizations, requests and disclosures as well as mark those disclosures in the patient’s record.

Confidential status
The Patient Privacy feature enables your practice to mark an individual patient as confidential and patients with issues that have been added to the Problem List in Intergy EHR can automatically be marked as confidential. Only those users or groups of users who have security permissions that allow selecting and viewing confidential patients will be able to view the patient’s record in Intergy.

Ready to get started?
The Intergy suite of products includes these privacy features and more. If you’re ready to take the next step toward implementing this platinum standard approach in your practice, Sage Software can help. To set up an on-site demonstration or receive additional information about Intergy, please: