Manager is emailing my personal email address

Nurses HIPAA

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Specializes in Med-Surg, Travel RN.

I am a travel nurse and I gave my nurse manager my email address thinking that she would just send me my schedule. Turns out she uses that to email me anything and everything from sending me a picture of the break room stating that we have no maid service to letting me know that I Made a medication error. Which brings me to my point. She sent me an incident report asking me to respond to my error through my personal email address. It had the patient's name and everything. Is this considered a violation since my email is not secure?

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Do you have a work email? If so, she needs to use it. HIPAA requires that it be encrypted.

I would also call her and tell her to send email to your work email.

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And I would change my personal email. If you do not formally close the old one with the service, if through yahoo, it is supposed to go dormant after about four months of nonuse. It goes without saying that from now on you do not give out the new email unless you are ok with the recipient of that info. Many people have at least two email addresses, a formal one that they may use for work purposes, and a personal one, that is only for family or close friends.

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Specializes in Med-Surg, Travel RN.

I think from now on I will never give out my email again. I thought it would just be for my schedule. I have only worked there a couple weeks and have received over 40 emails.

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Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.

We get several emails a month telling us it's against hospital protocol and punishable by termination to send patient information through a personal email address. Close the account and email your friends and family with the new email address. Ask the manager to use work email.

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Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.

Block that address. Problem solved. Then, as suggested, get a new email addy. And keep it to yourself.

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Specializes in MICU, SICU, CICU.

It would be good to ask the moderators to move this to the travel nursing forum.

I would mention your concerns to the Clinical liason or recruiter at your agency, but I would handle this myself. It is a tricky situation because a manager can , and probably will, retaliate if upper management learns about this data breach.

It is possible that this manager did not realize she was using a non hospital email. I would not take this personally and I would be extremely diplomatic.

I would reply by saying that "I am sure that it was an oversight that this document was sent to my personal email address. I will delete it. I am not comfortable discussing protected health information through my personal email account but I will respond in writing if needed. Please provide a hospital email and resend that incident report or call me anytime today or before 12 tomorrow. "

Don't escalate what is probably human error or an HR glitch. If you can handle this reasonably, it will go a long way toward smoothing over the other incident or misunderstanding as well.

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Specializes in critical care, ER,ICU, CVSURG, CCU.

IcuRNmaggie said it best.......social media is a very slippery slope

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Specializes in Med-Surg, Travel RN.

Yeah I have no intentions of taking the issue any further than just simply letting the manager know I think it would be safer for her to just let me know on the phone or in person. I don't want to burn bridges or get anyone in trouble. Unfortunately, there are no hospital emails at this facility. I personally do not care for that method of communication especially when it has patient information in it.

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Specializes in CDI Supervisor; Formerly NICU.
It would be good to ask the moderators to move this to the travel nursing forum.

Why? What does this have to do with travel nursing?

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Specializes in MICU, SICU, CICU.

Travel nurses are not change agents. The politics of addressing a clinical issue without offending the staff can be very tricky. This is why I suggested behaving in a reasonable and diplomatic manner. With an incident report pending, the OP is already in a vulnerable position.

If a travel nurse works with several agencies and hospitals, closing the email account would be really inconvenient and could even affect future opportunities for temporary employment.

Other travel professionals may have encountered this before. I have not. They may have suggestions on how to adapt to this

facility's practices and some strategies on how to handle communicate well without a encrypted hospital email or when dealing with an adverse event report and a HIPAA violation.

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Yeah I have no intentions of taking the issue any further than just simply letting the manager know I think it would be safer for her to just let me know on the phone or in person. I don't want to burn bridges or get anyone in trouble. Unfortunately, there are no hospital emails at this facility. I personally do not care for that method of communication especially when it has patient information in it.

I seems to me that there is a bigger issue with this hospital not having safe, secure email. By law, personal email accounts cannot be used to transmit patient info so the hospital is very much in the wrong and by making everyone use their personal email, bringing them into the violation of HIPAA, they are creating a terrible situation.

You and the other Nurses can't use your personal emails- period. As you stated, you will ask her to only use in person and phone communication. If there is push back from them, which there may very well be, stick to your guns to save yourself and license. They should have to buck up and get email addresses for everyone since it is so much easier.

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