Can I Install Security Cameras in My Office and Avoid HIPAA Problems?

Making sure your office is secure is important in this day and age. It is important to have a monitor security system in your office, but what about security cameras?

Transcription:

We hope everyone’s having a fantastic week, we’ve gotten a number of calls lately in regard to security and making sure that your office is secure. The most recent has to do with cameras. So I’m going to touch on that in just a minute. But first of all, I want to make sure that we say that we do believe it is very important to have your office with some sort of a security system. In today’s day and age, it’s incredibly affordable to be able to have a monitor security system in your office. And we would recommend that we believe that that is the greatest deterrent to avoid having someone break into your office and of course, then the subsequent HIPAA breach that may that most likely would occur, because they would then have access to the patient records, right? And so you want to be careful of that. And we believe that’s why a security system is important. But the question we got, and really it ends up being a bit more complex than just should I get a security system is or what about security cameras?

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Well, first of all, the general consensus is this, you cannot install those security cameras in areas where patients have a reasonable expectation of privacy. So of course, that eliminates any kind of treatment room. Open treatment rooms get a bit more of a gray area. Because there’s less of that expectation of privacy, however, we would recommend that you stay away from open treatment rooms as well. So that leaves a few areas that are without question. And that would be your reception area, if you will your waiting room it would be perfectly acceptable to have a camera in there, as well as anything aimed at the exterior portion of your office, whether you know, it’s your front door at your back door, or at those doors as long as it doesn’t pick up any kind of treatment area. For example, one of the calls we took had, you know, hey, our back door goes into our open treatment area in the back. And I would say that you can install it only if it picks up only the door and doesn’t have any chance of picking up any kind of patients that are going to be treated in that area. So you want to be cautious in that arena as well. That leaves really just your office areas, right? And so if you want to have cameras installed in your office areas, then you need to have some other you need to exercise some pretty extreme caution, or they can’t pick up any information that would be protected health information. So you have to be careful that files, names of patients things along those lines, your screens for your computers, that the cameras can’t pick up anything that’s on those screens or on the files, because then that would be of course then recording HIPAA protected information.

And so you want to make sure that that you’re covering yourself as far as the security risk basis, because interestingly, even HHS, says that a security camera helps in making your files and your information more secure. But of course, it opens up that catch-22 of making sure that you’re also not in violation. Now, if you’re taking that information and broadcasting over the internet because that’s another question that pops up on occasion. In other words, if those security cameras are accessible online, then really all of the same rules apply. That if there’s any protected health information that can be obtained on those cameras, you want to avoid that. The cameras going to pick up any information, anything in regards to just the patients in those areas that they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, then that’s fine. But the moment that they begin to expect privacy is the moment that you have to make sure that you understand that those cameras shouldn’t be used, especially those that are transmitted over the internet. So hopefully this helps you out and we’ll catch you next week.