Pediatric Coding Alert

For your pediatric practice to meet HIPAA compliance, all employees have to do their share of the work. Billers and coders have their own tasks for meeting compliance. Teena George, a certified HIPAA specialist and owner of Humboldt Medical Solutions, provides the checkpoints on this cheat sheet for billing-office managers and billers who need to meet HIPAA privacy and security compliance.

  Lock your offices.

  Lock your filing cabinets.

  Lock your faxes in authorized offices and use privacy statement fax cover pages.

  On your computer monitors, keep a security screen saver, accessible only by a password that a few select members in the office know, and put a timer on it so it will deactivate in one to three minutes.

  Turn computers away from heavily trafficked areas.

  Inform your staff members of HIPAA.

  Sign your business-associate contracts.

  Reduce the number of people who look at patient files. Make sure cleaning crews can't access the files.   
 
  Specify office positions that do and don't deal with patient files in a meeting with employees. Instruct physicians to look only at files of the patients they're consulting, assisting, or providing patient care.

  Refrain from speaking about patient information to people who don't need it to do their jobs. Everyone in the office is on a "need-to-know basis only."

To find out more about how your office can reach HIPAA compliance, check out this Web site: http://pages.prodigy.net/hummed/index.html.