Patient Privacy and Confidentiality: A performance measurement toolkit for assessing organizational culture
This performance measurement toolkit provides an opportunity for health care organizations to demonstrate whether their policies, practices, and organizational culture are consistent with protecting patient privacy. Uniquely, the toolkit also helps organizations ascertain whether having standard policies and procedures to protect the privacy of sensitive medical information results in privacy being taken seriously, staff treating privacy as an important value, and patients feeling their privacy is sufficiently secure.
The toolkit is consistent with the regulatory framework for protecting privacy that is provided by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). While HIPAA provides organizations with a regulatory framework for protecting privacy, the toolkit also focuses on the underlying cultural and ethical principles that make privacy important and are key to preserving the trust that is central to health care. Many of the documents, policies, and procedures covered in this toolkit are addressed by HIPAA, and are marked as such.
Content provided by: Institute for Ethics