Risk Analysis - Remote Working and Virtual Health | Episode #086

Practice Management Nuggets

Is Remote Working A Good Choice For Your Healthcare Practice?

In our healthcare practices, we have policies and procedures to identify the reasonable safeguards we need take to protect personal and health information entrusted to us.

But when employees complete their roles off-site, due to personal circumstances or to ensure business continuity in unusual situations, we need to take action to ensure reasonable safeguards are in place to protect the privacy, confidentiality, and security of personal health information.

Remote Work May Be Available to Employees

Working from home is at the sole discretion of the custodian and owner of the clinic. Examples when this may be applicable include:

• Business continuity - due to technical, physical, or other unusual circumstances.
• Work levelling – volumes of work are distributed to another location usually for a short duration.
• Illness / personal circumstances – where an employee is unable to report to work at the clinic but can continue to complete their roles off-site.

Some administrative tasks in a healthcare office—for example, incoming phone calls, appointment booking, appointment reminders, billing, and/or transcription—could be done from a home office environment. Sometimes even follow-up and consultations from the healthcare provider can be done remotely, too.

The healthcare provider or custodian is ultimately responsible to ensure the secure collection, use, and disclosure of health information.

Is Remote Working Good For Your Business?

As the custodian, you must decide if remote working is a good option for your business. When you decide that this is a viable option for your business, you then need to

• Determine if remote working is appropriate for your employees.
• Identify what clinic / business resources need to be provided to the employee remote worker.
• What reasonable safeguards need to be implemented to protect the privacy, confidentiality, and security of personal (health) information.

In this podcast episode, Jean Eaton shares how to prepare a risk assessment that you can use as part of your PIA submission for Remote Working and Virtual Health.