Policy on De-Identification of copies of helath records

The HIM department is responsible for responding to requests for copies of records that required De-Identification prior to release.

An example might be a request for copies of medical records from a drug company is conducting studies on patients with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Copies of the patients' records will be printed and sent to the drug company.

Names, addresses, identifying information must be obliterated from the printed copies. Because the copies will not contain identifying patient information a patient authorization is not required.

Select policies, procedures and guidelines provided for benchmarking attached below under Benchmarking Resources based on appropriateness to this topic, or you may research policies, guidelines and standards on your own to use as a benchmark.

Review your selected policies, procedures and guidelines and select the information after comparing those resources that you will include in your policy and write your policy on de-identification of health records.

The completed typed policy should be 2 pages. If you use a source for the policy, state the source at the end of the policy under a heading titled references.Make sure to use the policy templet attached below

This week we are looking at patient identifiable and aggregate data. If you have made it this far in your education then by now you already know what patient identifiable data is.

Aggregate data is data that is combined from several measurements. Aggregate data can be quite helpful when you are not looking to work with large numbers of individual data elements and is very useful in the healthcare setting.

Though we are looking at two topics this week, your project will focus on policies for the de-indentification of patient records.

Be sure to include what information needs to be blocked, how it will be done, and HIPAA references on patient authorization of de-identified information.