How to report an incident | Help Center | Accountable

Reporting an Unauthorized Disclosure of PHI is Everyone's Responsibility

There is a very important definition you need to know before reading further into this article. The word 'incident' is the one we are going to re-contextualize. When we hear the word incident with regard to H.I.P.A.A. compliance it means, "An unauthorized disclosure of P.H.I. (Protected Health Information)." 

To provide an example of an unauthorized disclosure of PHI:

You work for a Primary Care Physician as an Office Manager. It just so happens that your Organization treats two different people with the name John Smith. One day, you make an honest mistake when mailing John some test results and ended up sending them to the other John Smith! 

While this is an error any one of us could make, it is in all technicality an incident. The H.I.P.A.A. rule clearly states that incidents must be reported to the Privacy Officer for your Organization. Please read on for further detail on how one goes about submitting such a report within Accountable. 

Here is a video where we explain how anyone in your Organization can go about reporting an incident anonymously, should one occur, utilizing Accountable's built-in reporting mechanism. 

There are several fields which require filling out to report an incident. They are self-explanatory so we won't dive too deep into those fields. Please feel welcome to reach out to us with questions of that nature any time. 

Instead of discussing those fields, we are going to cover the aspect of the Incident Reporting Mechanism most important to a Privacy Officer whose Organization utilizes Accountable; The Report Incident button. 

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When someone reports an incident you, as Privacy Officer within your Organization, will receive an email with an accounting of the event. This should be taken as a signal to begin investigating what happened. If you are unfamiliar with how to do that, please contact Chuck to assist. 

We hope that you found this article helpful! 

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