Handling Medical Privacy For Psychiatric Care

By Author: Jaun Paul
Total Articles: 53
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A facility is going to offer psychiatric services to certain residents with mental health issues or psychiatric diagnoses. These services will be provided by psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners and will cover individual counseling and group therapy. Will the facility need to have more HIPAA security related specifically to the psychiatric services?


At the outset, decide in consultation with the psychiatric professionals involved what records the facility will maintain, and what records only the psychiatric professional will maintain. This distinction is vital because the facility is responsible under HIPAA only for those records maintained by the facility and the psychiatric professionals will be responsible for complying with HIPAA regarding the records they maintain.


The facility, if it will maintain records of this type ...
... of treatment, should consult state laws. Many states have laws that provide more protection than HIPAA regarding certain types of psychiatric records. If state laws do cover records maintained by the facility, it must specify additional requirements for releasing the records.


Also see to it that HIPAA itself provides special protection for psychotherapy notes. For instance, the authorization for release of psychotherapy notes cannot be combined with a general authorization for release of other types of records. However, the HIPAA definition of psychotherapy is restricted and applies only to notes by mental health professional documenting or analyzing the contents of conversation during a counseling session that are maintained separately from the medical record.


Remember that a psychotherapy note under HIPAA is not inclusive of summaries of diagnoses, functional status, treatment plans, symptoms, etc.


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