Question

You are the Privacy Officer for Quality Hospital. Describe your HIPAA training plan for the workforce. Include all of the following in your plan:

• who you would train
• which topics you would cover
• how often trainings would be scheduled
• what documentation would you maintain about the training

Answer 1

Any employee directly associated with handling medical records, nurses, and the immediate supervisors would be the target audience for the HIPAA training plan. This is because of their increased and prolonged use of the information while gathering or filling up the necessary details, whether it be using an EHR system or not.

The training topics would need to be customized based on the interaction the employee shows, this can be limited interaction or for employees just handling the files that are being transferred to their physicians. The considerations would, therefore, be placed on training employees separately because HIPAA does not require every employee to get the same training. We can, therefore, excuse employees that have almost no interaction with the records.

The topics that will be covered in the training would be the identification of the PHI, using the minimum necessary rule, and also how the information is disclosed. The training would also be done on ethics, the importance of confidentiality, the patient's right to confidentiality, and the concept of authorization. The training would also contain the necessary lectures on standards, operating policy, and the legal consideration for breach of confidentiality.

The training would be conducted bi-yearly(twice a year) or quarterly, a higher frequency would provide no useful output and a lower frequency of occurrence would make it harder to train any new recruits that the company brings.

The documentation would contain the date of conduction, the name of the individuals or the batch that receive the training, the time frame of the study, and information about its success that was determined by monitoring their actions in the future.

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