copyright 2003, Welford Medical Computing, Inc. All rights reserved

HIPAA requires that you notify each patient of your Notice of Privacy Practices. Each patient must then either acknowledge having received this information, or refuse to acknowledge it, and you need to keep track of which patients have been notified so that you needn't notify them again (unless your policy changes, at which time you have to notify them again). Welford Chart Notes version 4.4 makes it easy to track this information.

1. First, press Reports\HIPAA\Rule Reminder, check Add a Rule Reminder to remind you when a patient has not yet acknowledged your policy and press Ok. This step creates a Rule Reminder which will automatically show up each time the chart is opened of a patient who has not yet acknowledged (or been recorded as refusing to acknowledge) receiving your policy. The Rule Reminder has a Rule of "If Never Had HIPAA POLICY ACK" and a Reminder of "Then ask the patient to sign your HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices". It also adds a Test to your Lab Book Vocabulary called HIPAA POLICY ACK, which keeps track of these acknowledgments.

2. Each time a patient comes in to your office and this Rule Reminder appears, ask the patient to review your Notice of Privacy Practices. After the patient reviews it, press Reports\HIPAA\ Acknowledgment. In general, simply accept today's date in the Date field (unless for some reason you save these up and enter them all at a later date). Enter the patient's name for the Patient field. Choose either Patient acknowledges receiving HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices, or Patient refuses to acknowledge receiving HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices. If you ask that each patient sign a piece of paper indicating this, you can get even fancier and store the image of that piece of paper along with this acknowledgment. Otherwise, simply press Ok and the information is stored. From now on, the Rule Reminder created in step 1 will no longer trigger for this patient.

3. If you decide to store the image of the paper showing the patient's signature, press the Image button. This opens up the Image Utility. Then press Edit\Acquire to launch your scanner and place the image into the Image Utility, or use one of the other Edit functions to get the image there. (For example, if you prefer storing each image as its own file, then first import the image with your scanner, assigning the image a file name; then press Edit\Link and enter that file name to link to that image file). Once you have the image displayed in the Image Utility, press Ok and the image is linked to the patient's acknowledgment.

3. Change the text of the Rule to read: "If Last HIPAA POLICY ACK before 10-1-2003". This causes the program to see if the patient last acknowledged it before you changed the policy, which means the patient now has to acknowledge the new policy.

4. Change the text of the Explanation to read: "Patient has not yet been asked to acknowledge your new HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices, put into effect on October 1, 2003".

5. Press Ok to store this Rule Reminder. From now on, you will be automatically reminded whenever the chart of a patient who has not yet acknowledged your revised Notice of Privacy Practices is opened.

Here are some shortcuts you can use in the Advanced Writer which were not previously documented:

We are hard at work on version 4.5, and have already added over a dozen new features, including Template Images and Template Sharing. Please let us know if there are features you would like to see in version 4.5.