Required HIPAA Acknowledgement Signature

HIPAA compliance mistakes can cost you. Make sure your Notice of Privacy Practices is properly delivered, acknowledged, and updated to avoid risk and stay compliant.

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Does the Provider Have To Make A Good Faith Effort To Obtain Acknowledgement of Notice

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Transcript:

Some of the simple things that we run into in a compliance arena, some of the things that we may have been trying to do for the last 20-some odd years, sometimes are the things that really come back to bite us because we don’t have some of the finer details worked out. One of those areas would be surrounding your HIPAA notice, your HIPAA Privacy Policy, or, as it’s officially called, it’s your Notice of Privacy Practices, or your NPP. That particular document, you have to give a copy to the patient. Let me say that again, you actually have to give a copy of that to the patient. Now, it can be done electronically. There are ways to make that happen, but if you’re meeting the person in-person, then you’ve got to give a copy to the patient, and they have to acknowledge that you gave them a copy of your Notice of Privacy Practices. So they have to actually sign that you gave them a copy of that notice. Super important, you can hand them a copy. They acknowledge that you gave it to them, and then they could hand it back to you, or just leave it on the desk. Or you could have a trash can sitting right there, and they could choose to throw it away, but you still have to do your part in getting it.

Now, of course, you still have to post it in your practice and all of those things. Now, this is also super important. You don’t have to notify them if you change it. You do have to update your post in your practice, right? You do have to update it on your website. You have to make the updates where you’re required to make those updates if you make changes, and incidentally, I can’t imagine a world where things have not changed in your practice that would require you to change your Notice of Privacy Practices over the last 20-some odd years. So if you haven’t revisited your Notice of Privacy Practices or your HIPAA Privacy Policy, or whatever you want to call it, if you haven’t revisited that in a very long time, I would encourage you to do that. In fact, most definitely, in today’s fast-moving age, if you’ve changed your EHR systems or changed anything in your practice, you want to make sure that you’ve gone through and updated that, but you don’t have to give them a new copy. So you’re not talking about them re-acknowledging that you’ve made any changes.

This is for new patients, or bluntly, if you have patients that you’ve seen for a long time and you don’t have an acknowledgement from them that you gave them a copy of that privacy practice policy, then at that stage you’re you need to get that wrapped up, and need to get that taken care of by giving them a copy, so get the acknowledgement. The only time that you don’t have to do that is if the patient refuses to sign an acknowledgement, and then you can actually document that refusal. Don’t document it if they haven’t refused it. And it’s not that they’re refusing the document, it’s that they’re refusing the acknowledgement that you gave them a copy. So you can again, you can hand it to them. They can acknowledge that they received it, and they can hand it right back to you, or set it down on the desk. Or you can even have a little file box there that they just drop it in. And then you can effectively recycle that document, but you do have to hand them a copy, and they do have to acknowledge it. We’ll catch you next week.