HIPAA and talking about patients

[mashamontago]

is it illegal to talk about patients on blogger/livejournal? you don't use their name or any personal info.. u just use their diagnosis and s/s..

[Tait, MSN, RN]

I was told you could identify a patient with a room number and a list of meds in nursing school. No dates, no names, no other information. While I don't necessarily worry about every post I make on, say this forum. I do keep a very paranoid view just to be safe.

I tend to think of it this way, would I want to be cruising the internet, and find a blog that listed details about my hospital stay or those of a family or friend? Even if no one could point it to me? Not really, and I know my mother would become suicidal at the mere thought of it.

I would save the blogging on patients for a paper or offline journal.

Tait

[truern]

Curious, say for instance, I was on here posting about my long night at work and discussed my patients without naming names and someone from my job recognized me, is it then a hipaa violation? I'm just wondering because i've had that pointed out to me before so now it's making me more nervous to even bother posting about things at work.

If they had the same knowledge about the situations and the patients I don't see how that's a violation. I've never seen you post anything that could identify a patient from the millions of other patients out there. If there's something about co-workers they recognize that's not a violation of HIPAA.

[LilPeanut, MSN, RN, NP]

I have a similar issue. We had a patient die (a primary for me) and I posted on facebook about it. We call all our babies "Friend", so I said I was "sad that Friend died and wished his family peace and a safe trip to heaven for Friend". My coworkers knew exactly who I meant, because we tend to only have one patient die at a time, thankfully.

But one of my coworkers contacted me warning that it could be a violation of hipaa - I took down everything and all the references to it, just to be safe, but now I'm concerned.

[blondy2061h, MSN, RN]

I have a similar issue. We had a patient die (a primary for me) and I posted on facebook about it. We call all our babies "Friend", so I said I was "sad that Friend died and wished his family peace and a safe trip to heaven for Friend". My coworkers knew exactly who I meant, because we tend to only have one patient die at a time, thankfully.

But one of my coworkers contacted me warning that it could be a violation of hipaa - I took down everything and all the references to it, just to be safe, but now I'm concerned.

I wouldn't think that'd be a violation.

[BabyLady, BSN, RN]

Curious, say for instance, I was on here posting about my long night at work and discussed my patients without naming names and someone from my job recognized me, is it then a hipaa violation? I'm just wondering because i've had that pointed out to me before so now it's making me more nervous to even bother posting about things at work.

Yes, because if you post information that is so specific that you can be recognized by a co-worker, then it's a HIPAA violation...b/c you posted enough detail to where they could make the connection.

That is one of the reasons why I don't have my city or state in my profile, I only talk about the general region of the country I am from, not the specific state and I don't mention my school on here either.

That makes it much more difficult for someone to put two and two together.

Plus I don't tell anyone, not even my closest friends, that I even use this message board.

[LilPeanut, MSN, RN, NP]

But your coworkers, being that they are coworkers, know much more information than anyone in the general public has. ie: On my unit you can say "Oh my God, it was so much like bed 5, it was creepy." Now, everyone who works there knows exactly to whom you are referring (a patient several years ago) but there's no way to determine who, what, when or anything about the patient. No one could ever identify anything about anyone, except for people who already knew the privileged info.