Safeguarding Protected Health Information: Legal and Practice Considerations

At the conclusion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Define PHI and recall the requirements for handling PHI, including business and individual responsibilities for use and disclosure of PHI.

2. Identify the safeguards businesses who handle PHI must take to prevent inappropriate PHI disclosure.

3. List the requirements of the Breach Notification Rule and when, and to who, must be notified of inappropriately disclosed PHI.

4. Describe patient privacy regulations as they pertain to telehealth services and ePHI.

Pharmacy staff, regardless of practice setting, must access patient health information on a daily basis in order to perform their jobs. It is critical that they act in accordance with the law when interacting with and sharing patient protected health information, or they could face action from their employer or their law, and their employer could face fines and lose the trust of the public. In order to prevent a breach in privacy, the pharmacy staff must understand privacy laws.

This CE activity will provide in-depth coverage of healthcare privacy law, focusing on HIPAA, HITECH, ePHI, and Telehealth. It will provide a background and history of those laws, review who must comply and what the requirements are, and use case studies and examples to discuss appropriate and inappropriate disclosure of PHI. At the conclusion of this activity, learners will be confident in handling PHI in accordance with federal law and with appropriately reporting breaches of PHI. Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians will appreciate the requirements of businesses that handle PHI.