The Rising Need for Privacy Compliance Training
The right privacy compliance training for healthcare professionals helps participants understand regulatory requirements and operate in a way that prevents privacy breaches without limiting capacity.
Privacy incidents have been proven to negatively impact the quality of care patients receive. The extra work of managing a patient privacy breach refocuses resources away from care delivery. Operations typically halt for days during recovery, and the effect on operations can be measured for months or even years. Mandatory breach reporting laws rightly enforce disclosure to affected individuals, which reduces trust and can damage patient-clinic relationships.
Given that human error is a factor in 88% of privacy breaches, most are preventable with the right training and preparation. Specifically, privacy compliance training is crucial in healthcare settings for several reasons.
Better Understanding of Patient Confidentiality
Compliance training ensures your team understands the importance of maintaining confidentiality and respect for patient privacy. Especially with team-based care being implemented across healthcare, now more than ever, there is a need to bring all members of the care team on the same page about the ‘dos and don’ts’ of patient information sharing and handling.
Clarify Terms of Regulatory Compliance
Many of the laws that govern patient privacy are not common sense and can often be improperly interpreted. Compliance training helps staff understand their obligations under the regulations and avoid costly violations. These sessions also give your team an opportunity to learn any ambiguous or unclear terms they may encounter within the compliance framework so that there is no room for misinterpretation.
Improve Operational Efficiency
When healthcare operations implement policies and procedures to address privacy risks without a proper understanding of requirements, safeguards and workflows are often over-complicated, which adds extra effort and overwhelm.
- Example A: One clinic believed that storing digital copies of patient files exported from their electronic records system on a computer desktop constitutes a privacy breach. So, their process was to print files to paper from the EMR and scan them back into a specific folder. In reality, there is only a breach in this scenario if an unauthorized person is actively monitoring the files on the computer desktop. The extra effort and consumables cost are unnecessary.
- Example B: Some clinics believe physical mail to be a safe and effective way to send patient information. However, mailing letters can cost as much as $5 each, and there’s no sure way to track delivery or recall the information if it is addressed or delivered to the wrong recipient. Clinics have measured a 75% reduction in referral processing time and a $1000/month savings by switching to a more secure digital delivery service.
Helps Mitigate the Risk of Breach
Privacy compliance training helps prevent data breaches, which can lead to severe financial penalties, legal repercussions, and damage to the organisation’s reputation. When your team learns to handle data more securely within data management protocols and follows best practices every day, they are better equipped to recognise red flags and security gaps and prevent breaches from happening.
Helps in Building Trust with Patients
Patients are more likely to share personal information when they feel their data is protected. Effective privacy compliance training not only teaches the members of your care team to safeguard patient information but also how to communicate with patients in a more transparent manner about data usage and management. This fosters a culture of trust between patients and healthcare providers.
Improves Organisational Culture and Accountability
Regular compliance training promotes awareness and accountability among staff, creating a culture of privacy and teamwork that extends throughout the organization. Care teams that are asked to refresh their privacy compliance knowledge on a regular basis better recognise privacy compliance as a collective responsibility and not just a job done by the IT or management teams.
Build Empowered Employees
The right privacy training gives healthcare teams a new lens through which to approach their work and identify ways to be more compliant in their day-to-day. Compliance training courses give them the agency and confidence to think critically about privacy practices and respond proactively to challenges and privacy risks.
Incident Response Preparedness
Privacy compliance training helps staff recognize potential privacy breaches and understand the appropriate actions to take when incidents occur, minimizing the potential impact. Organizations with a defined privacy breach response plan spend significantly less time and money recovering from breaches if they do happen.
Online Privacy Compliance Training with Brightsquid
Training is the foundation of ongoing privacy compliance in any healthcare setting.
When you make privacy compliance training a priority, you better protect patient information, comply with laws, and create a safe environment for both patients and staff.
Learn how Brightsquid privacy training courses can support privacy breach prevention at your clinic on our Online Privacy Compliance Training page. Delivered fully online, Brightsquid’s training is accessible, flexible, and ideal for onboarding new staff or maintaining annual compliance certifications.