Is Your Case History A HIPAA Problem?

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Hi everybody. This is Dr. Perry Barnhill. With the Fearless Chiropractor, and I wanna welcome to the presentation regarding HIPAA compliance and all the things we don’t want to do. This is something new. You have to have it, so you have to absolutely be aware of it and we’re gonna talk about it. We’re gonna show you how to do it.

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And I also want to give a big thanks to ChiroSecure for allowing us to present this, con this content and all the things you need to have. Today we are gonna talk about reproductive healthcare and certain forms that you need to have filled out before you release that information and hipaa. And before you go anywhere, let me talk to you about this.

’cause I know a lot of you’re saying or thinking, what in the world do I have to do with reproductive healthcare? It’s not what I do in my office. However, anything that contains reproductive healthcare in your documentation, in your notes. Even in your patient’s initial intake forms, you are going to be required to be aware of this new law that is coming out.

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It’s actually already here. Now what does that mean? It could include things such as contraception, birth control, pregnancies, fertility, sterilization, sexual health, and a lot of our patients fill out these forms when they come in our office, and so many of you and so many of us. Have this information that we actually ask in our forms, or it comes up in our consultations with our patients, and we have it in our record.

So make sure you stay tuned and you watch the webinar to see what you need to do if this comes up. Okay, everybody. There are some new things out there in the world of hipaa. There are new requirements. They’re what we refer to as a testation statement and form. So I’m gonna talk to you about all of this stuff.

We’re gonna talk about the action steps and the things that we need to know and the things we have to do absolutely starting now. So this is all about strengthening the reproductive healthcare privacy under the new HIPAA privacy rule. Okay, so let’s talk about what it is now. As some of you may recall, there are new rules for 2025.

In fact, there’s about seven of ’em, and these things have to be in play as well. But even after that, they came out with some additional things. To this that we need to be aware of, and I want to talk to you about the summary here, just some of the final rule changes that they have. What it does is it modifies the privacy rule to better protect reproductive healthcare privacy, and I’ll tell you exactly what that is.

And also it prohibits the use or disclosure of PHI. Now remember P i’s protected health information. Basically the records that we have on patients that solely is used to investigate or penalize lawful reproductive care. It requires, and this is what I was talking about, this new form, it requires an obtaining a written attestation before disclosing the protected health information in certain circumstances.

So all covered entities, this is all of us doctors out there have to update our notices of patient privacy practices accordingly. We’ll talk some more about this here in just a bit. Let’s define, or at least try to best define what it is and what they’re referring to when they talk about reproductive healthcare.

’cause it’s very broad. And this definition came from the federal registry. It’s a non-exclusive list. And what I’m gonna do, I’m just gonna read over the main points here. I’m not gonna read through everything and define it for you. I’m just gonna go through the main topics. So this non-exclusive list includes contraceptive, contraception, management of pregnancy.

Fertility and infertility and family planning, sterilization and sexual health. So who is affected by this? Guess what? It’s us. We’re healthcare providers, so all of us are affected. We have to abide by this. Also, healthcare clearing houses have to abide for this. Healthcare plans, basically insurance companies and any business associate that you have that handles protected health information.

When do we need to have this attestation? Now, this is a form I’m gonna show you here in a second, so I just want to go through the who, what, where, why, when, all that other stuff. So it’s gonna be a form that we’re gonna need to send out in certain situations. Now these are the scenarios where we, our offices will need to send this form out to whoever’s asking for the records before we give them to ’em in these situations.

If it’s in regards to reproductive healthcare, just like I said in the definition before. So if. In this scenario, health oversight activities, if they ask for things, validate, you have to disclose that it’s not gonna be used for punishable offenses. I’ll talk about that in a second. I know it gets crazy, but it’s on the actual form.

If a judicial or administrative proceedings ask for it or have to send the testation form out to these people, if law enforcement believe it or not, ask for anything regarding reproductive healthcare, we have to send them this attestation form before we give them. Any kind of the records from the patient or the coroner’s office or medical examiner.

So these are situations right here in front of you in boldface that if any of these people or agencies ask for reproductive healthcare records that you may or may not have with these patients. Some of us have this in our records, some of us don’t. But if. The reproductive healthcare information is in your records, and these folks ask for it.

You have to send them a form before you can actually disclose it, and then they send the form back to you. Here’s the form, and it’s just a model attestation form. I’ll show you here in a second. Next slide. And what this is this is the requirement. This is the required step I’m talking about. Before you disclose PHI for certain purposes, again, certain purposes that have reproductive healthcare in them, so your records that have reproductive healthcare in them, you’re gonna have to send this form to these people if they ask for it.

And what it does is this, it ensures that the requester, again, the folks that I just referred to, they attest. So they’re gonna tell you that the information is not sought to investigate or punish lawful reproductive health services. Here’s the form. All right? And then we have a link for you, a QR code at the end of this presentation that you can look you can click on and you can get this form.

This is from the government, so it’s the model attestation form, the model. The reason we use that, because it’s their form, so why not use the form that they have, and basically this is the form that you have to send to in those certain scenarios. On a few slides ago that I said, if they ask for information regarding reproductive healthcare as we defined it, you have to send this form to them.

Before you send information, and basically they’re gonna fill out this form and they’ll send it back to you, and basically it says that they’re not gonna use any of the information that they gathered to punish the person or for any unlawful, basically it’s just not used for punishment of the definitions of those reproductive healthcare.

So again, you send this form to those people. If they ask for reproductive healthcare and they send it back to you, and then you can send them that information. Here’s the link. You can click on that, the QR code, it’ll send you right over there. You can get that attestation form. I’ll bring it up for you again here at the end of the slideshow, but that’s there for you.

Alrighty. So as you probably figured, and unfortunately there’s things that you’re gonna have to do, some action items. You have to document everything, so you’re gonna have to keep records of policy updates, training logs. Contestations and disclosures. Disclosures and referring to every time we release protected health information to someone, we’re actually supposed to keep a record of it.

So if they ask, if the patient asks, we can go back and go, oh, hey, you know what, Sally, we sent it over here on this particular date. So you have to document that. We have to update certain policies in our HIPAA manuals, and we’ll talk about that. You have to do trainings. I’m gonna talk about that here in a second as well.

So here we go. Training and education. We have to. Train our staff on these things, so let ’em watch the slideshow. However, it’s that you’re gonna sit down and talk to them and train them, because if they have a records request that comes through from one of those agencies that I discussed and they sent it out, they set reproductive healthcare information out without an attestation, you could get in big trouble.

Big trouble. ’cause this is a big deal these days. So here’s what you wanna do. Talk to the staff. Identify what PHI requests will trigger that form, that attestation requirement. Distinguishing lawful reproductive healthcare from investigator, from category request. I can’t say that word, sorry, but you know what I’m saying.

Also, I. Knowing how to locate and use that form. So we gotta talk to the staff. We have to tell ’em, Hey, if these people ask for this stuff, this reproductive healthcare, how it’s, it’s a very broad definition. If these agencies or these scenarios ask for it, we have to send this form out. So your staff needs to know where to find this form.

How to send it out and make sure that they get it back. And then also they have to document the disclosures and you have to keep those forms of course. Like we pretty much have to keep everything ’cause it’s records and all of our documents when those things are requested. So make sure you train your staff.

’cause if they make a mistake. It’s on you. One of the things that I like to say is if your staff has any questions whatsoever concerns, and they’re not really sure if they should release something or not release something, make sure they ask you. ’cause if you send something out in this context, without that form it’s, you just don’t want to have to deal with the consequence.

’cause this is a big deal these days. Guess what, because there’s been policy updates. This specifically, we have to update our notice of patient privacy practices. It must reflect the new protections for reproductive health PHI, and also providing patients with clear, updated information on their rights and how their information is protected.

Aligning updates with the final rule guidelines. So it’s just one of the things that we have to do with these new laws. We have to update our notice of patient privacy policy. And as a side note, again, like business associate agreements, those are gonna be, have to be updated as well. There’s several things that you are really going to need to have to comply with all these new changes.

Here’s some next steps for you. Again, here’s another link. I know it’s redundant, but so you can download that attestation form, get it in your office, get it out in front of your staff so they know when to use this. Download your HIPAA compliance checklist. A lot of people are not really sure. I think most of us are sure whether or not we’re actually being HIPAA compliant, but some people like a checklist.

You can go through this, check these things if you’re not doing each and every one of these things on this compliance checklist, I. You’re not HIPAA compliant. And again, you don’t hear me talking about the fines that are associated with hipaa, but believe me, these are fines. These are penalties that you do not want to have to deal with in your practice ’cause they’re very damaging.

All righty. So if you wanna schedule a demo or if you just want to get started, you can go to the QR code here. If you wanna schedule a demo with us, you can go to this website right there at the top. Fearless provider.com/. Demo, I should say go dot fearless provider.com/demo. Or if you just want to get started, we have everything you need for hipaa.

You can go to w dot www.betterhipaablueprint.com, or I’m also more than happy to answer any questions for you. You can contact me at Dr. perry@betterhipaablueprint.com again. Big thanks to ChiroSecure for having us here. Make sure everybody makes sure you get on top of this stuff. In the meantime, have an amazing day.