HIPAA violation?

[astronautswife]

During one of my clinical rotations we were allowed to take home a part of the patients file to finish our homework. We had to turn the papers back in the next week in there entireity with the names blacked-out to be shredded.

We just got into legal class and we were told that we weren't allowed to do this even if we blacked the names out. Did any of you run into this situation? What do you think?

[drugstorecowgirl214]

Wow! Never were we allowed to take home anything. We had to keep their chart at the pod of the facility we were at and could only use the patients initials, etc.

[lemonaidangel]

We were never allowed to bring anything home with us either. Anything copied from the chart went straight into the shredder before leaving. And when we had to turn in our 13 page assessments to the instructor, we were only allowed to use the patient's initials on our paper work, or we had to make up an alias.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

I have been in a HIM (Health Information Management--used to be called Medical Records) program and our lab has a file of a whole bunch of complete actual inpatient and outpatient charts, probably over 500 of them. Actual demographic information such as names, addresses and social security numbers were carefully removed from these charts. The files are maintained by the HIM instructors who are HRIAs (Registered Health Information Administrators) which means they know HIPAA inside and out. They preach HIPAA to us night and day. They wouldn't have these files if they were a violation. Our program director was a former president of the state association of HIM. I think she knows the law. We've been told that some of these files are actually shared and traded nationally with other HIM schools.

I don't think you did anything wrong.

[Feels Like JD]

We actually have to cut the demographic info off of anything we leave the floor with. So the little box with the name and acct# and stuff actually gets shredd

ed.