Home Health & Hospice Week

Employees have a right to use social media, but must protect identifiable patient information. Another big risk to home care providers' HIPAA compliance is staff putting information on the Internet. Home health agencies and hospices are susceptible to "inadvertent disclosure of PHI on social media, such as Facebook," cautions attorney John Gilliland with The Gilliland Law Firm in Indianapolis. "Field staff become close to the patients and then share information about them on social media, forgetting that social media is very public." Remember that employees have a right to use Facebook and other social media, Gilliland says. You just must "remind them that social media is very public and that protected health information should never be posted -- that would be a HIPAA violation." "Individuals should not use their Facebook accounts to relate any personally identifiable information about their patients," emphasizes Jim Sheldon- Dean, director of compliance services for information security [...]