Resources for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

'Staged' Calls to Compliance Hotlines Can Help Separate Effective Operators From Bad Performers

www.aishealth.com

When the hotline operator answered the phone, he got an earful from a tearful employee of the County of Orange Health Care Agency (HCA) in California. The employee reported that her boss had thrown out all kinds of confidential patient information in the regular trash instead of shredding it. And her boss had threatened to cancel the caller's vacation if she breathed a word of her actions to anyone. But it was both a HIPAA violation and a breach of HCA's non-retaliation policy, and the employee just couldn't let it slide. "Someone higher up than me needs to stop her," the employee said.

So the hotline operator, who works for HCA's hotline vendor, wrote up a report detailing the employee's allegations and sent it to HCA's compliance officer. It was just another call among many that he handled day in, day out. Little did the hotline operator know that the complaint was a fake, a scenario crafted by HCA's chief compliance officer, Jeffrey Nagel, Ph.D., and his team, as part of its audit of hotline effectiveness.

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