HIPAA and Learning / Quality Improvement

[flipmd]

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So I have a list of all the patients I have ever taken care of in our EMR (we're allowed to create "lists"). Every now and then I take a look at what has happened to them (eg., discharged a patient X with chest pain for an outpatient stress but now I see that they're readmitted a month after, so I open the chart to see if I had missed someone with CAD I should have stressed while inpatient; or perhaps less clear, a patient Y who I had diagnosed with A1AT deficiency, just to check on how he's doing in general a year after and if his cirrhosis is becoming decompensated).

How far can you go under the "educational" exceptions in HIPAA. It can still be educational following someone longitudinally, but part of this is also curiosity (which is essential for learning, I guess).

Any inputs? Is there a possibility of getting in trouble for checking to see how a patient you had admitted 2 years before is doing? How else will you learn if you can't see long term outcomes?

 

[PMPMD]

So I have a list of all the patients I have ever taken care of in our EMR (we're allowed to create "lists"). Every now and then I take a look at what has happened to them (eg., discharged a patient X with chest pain for an outpatient stress but now I see that they're readmitted a month after, so I open the chart to see if I had missed someone with CAD I should have stressed while inpatient; or perhaps less clear, a patient Y who I had diagnosed with A1AT deficiency, just to check on how he's doing in general a year after and if his cirrhosis is becoming decompensated).

How far can you go under the "educational" exceptions in HIPAA. It can still be educational following someone longitudinally, but part of this is also curiosity (which is essential for learning, I guess).

Any inputs? Is there a possibility of getting in trouble for checking to see how a patient you had admitted 2 years before is doing? How else will you learn if you can't see long term outcomes?

What field are you in? Some fields naturally follow patients longer than others. For example, I'm in anesthesia, so it would be unusual for me to follow someone 1-2 years out. But in primary care fields, I would think this would be very normal.

I was not familiar with a time limit on HIPAA - ie at what point in time after you stop caring for a pt do they stop being your patient in the eyes of HIPAA?

 

[michaelrack]

HIPAA is pretty lenient- it's probably your hospital's policies that are going to give you problems. Check with you medical records department.