Posted: May 25th, 2022

Assume you are the department head of an HIM department in a large healthcare institution. You have an electronic patient record and your vendor provides cloud backup.

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HIPAA requires that all covered entities and business associates adequately plan in case of an event that disrupts normal day-to-day operations.
Assume you are the department head of an HIM department in a large healthcare institution. You have an electronic patient record and your vendor provides cloud backup. Your department reports to IT and the following activities are
housed in your department:
Release of Information: this is done via snail mail, email and electronic faxing
Coding of diagnoses and procedures
Required registries such as cancer, trauma, and other
Scanning of paper patient information obtained either by fax, mail, or drop off. This includes a quality review of any
information scanned into the chart
Physician credentialing
Maintenance of the EHR systems
Master Patient Index maintenance – including checking for duplicate records
Maintenance of the Chargemaster
Birth registration
Physician support: providing physicians in the institution and external to the institution with health information to
support real time patient care
Your executive team consists of yourself and 2 supervisors. You have 25 full and part-time staff. Your department is staffed 24/7.
You have the following situation. A cyber attack has impacted your primary and back-up systems. There is currently no access to your EHR system. Your IT department is working on getting the system up and running, but their estimated time frame for doing so is 48 hours. Although you are aware of a contingency plan for the hospital, it has not been updated or tested for over 2 years. Based on the information provided about your department, develop a contingency plan for this scenario.
In this scenario, what would you do first? Do you need to call in for additional staff support? Why or why not? How will they be utilized?
How will you inform the staff and in what order? Can you utilize the overhead announcements? Would that cause more problems? Consider administration, the floors, the ER, the labs, etc. Who outside the organization needs to be notified? Consider staff, vendors, business associates.
Are there any activities that can be suspended during this time?
How will medical activities be documented? You have been on an EHR system for many years and staff is not used to providing written documentation. They do not even know where to find the forms. How will you provide immediate training on the use of written documentation? How will vital patient results be communicated to the floors?
What data is most critical to be captured? How will that hand written documentation be back-entered into the system when it is available? Will it just be scanned in or will someone go in and re-enter the data? Be specific. Identify the critical activities that need to be established or completed immediately, within 24 hours, within 48 hours and those that can wait until a later time period.
What would you recommend for the future as it relates to the existing contingency plan?
Each of these items should be addressed in your report. There should be a minimum of 4 outside academic resources used for this assignment. 7th edition APA formatting is required for the paper and the resources.

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