Healthcare Employers, Privacy Officers Need To Prevent Employee Snooping
Human curiosity, interpersonal conflicts, shaming or bullying or financial gains are common motivators for snooping. We seem to be hard-wired to want to peek into someone else’s personal and private information. Snooping is a violation of trust between our patients and the healthcare providers and the people who work for them.
We want our patients to trust us. We need patients to share their personal information with us so that we can provide the appropriate health services to them. When healthcare providers and employees snoop in our patient’s information we destroy that trust with the patient. When employees are snooping in personal health information, it costs the employer time and money.
What Is Snooping?
Looking at someone’s personal information without having an authorized purpose to access that information to do your job is known as ‘snooping’.
Even when you are “just looking” at personal information but don’t share that information with anyone else, this is still a privacy breach.
It is illegal.
Snooping incidents are on the rise and can cost you time, money, heartache, and headache in your practice.
When there is an offence under the privacy legislation like the Health Information Act, there may be an investigation, charges and court appearances, fines, penalties, and loss of employment.
Snooping is entirely preventable. You can easily use the 5 low-cost steps to prevent employee snooping in your healthcare practice.
How Can You Prevent Employee Snooping?
Let’s take a look at the pro-active steps that you can take today to prevent employee snooping.
Show Notes
00:00 5 Steps To Prevent Employee Snooping *start podcast here
01:01 What is Privacy? What is a Privacy Breach?
01:29 What Is Snooping?
03:08 Step 1. Be A Privacy Champion
03:25 Name A Privacy Officer - Accountability
04:41 Policies And Procedures
05:11 Build Privacy Into Everything You Do
05:20 Step 2. Train
08:13 Step 3. Reasonable Safeguards
09:34 Step 4. Monitor
10:21 Step 5. Consequences
10:48 Sanctions and Discipline Policy
11:08 Privacy Breach Reporting
11:17 Employee Snooping
13:05 Summary 5 Steps
https://informationmanagers.ca/5-steps-to-prevent-employee-snooping/
Key word Searchie https://PracticeManagementNuggets.Live/search
Use Table-Top Privacy Breach Fire Drills to Protect Your Practice
Healthcare providers, owners, and privacy officers hear about big privacy breaches on the news and hope it won’t happen to them. It keeps them up at night...because they know that properly preventing or managing a privacy breach is critical to the continued success of their business!
If a privacy and security incident hits, you will be in crisis mode. This is not the time to read your procedures for the first time. Instead, having a solid, approved, and well-tested privacy breach management plan will be critical to an effective response.
Invest now in table-top exercises or ‘fire drills’ with your privacy incident response team using a simple privacy breach scenario. Use your written policies, procedures, forms, and create sample privacy breach response plans or ‘playbooks’ for different types of scenarios. This will help you to be better prepared in the event of an incident and—even better—help you to prevent a privacy breach in your healthcare practice.
Recorded February 23, 2021
Show Notes
00:38 Introduction Jean L. Eaton
00:45 Find an example.
Saskatchewan IPC finds ransomware attack results in one of the largest privacy breaches in this province involving citizens’ most sensitive data. January 8, 2021 - Ron Kruzeniski, Information and Privacy Commissioner. https://oipc.sk.ca/
04:15 4 Step Response Plan
05:20 Step 1 Contain the Breach
05:50 Step 2 Evaluate the Risks
06:54 Step 3 Notify
07:19 Step 4 Prevent The Breach From Happening Again
Do you need help to create your privacy breach management plan – and a mentor to help you get it done? Check out the 4 Step Response Plan https://informationmanagers.ca/4-step