Storing medical record number or date of service

We don't have a need to do this, but I know there are other threads in the Community regarding storing other ID data in RE (particularly this one about storing a student ID).  An Alias, replacing the SSN field, an Attribute, or as part of a concatenated RE ConstituentID may work for you.  I highly recommend determining what options may work and testing them on a small set of records.  Once you figure out which option works best, you can implement it across the database and remove the other tests.


 

We changed the SSN field to PID (Patient Identification number).  This works well for us.


FYI, we use the Alias field to store Student ID for those who are students of the Medical College.  (a smaller group)

Two different health organizations I know have two different views:


1. No info, period.


2. Patient ID may be used IF AND ONLY IF it carries no clinical data with it; for example, it's a simple number only and doesn't indicate service line, diagnosis, etc., by some sort of special coding or formatting of the patient ID. Dates of service can also be recorded, though very little else with that.


HIPAA does allow use of certain demographic info for fundraising purposes. Two resources to use to review what is considered "demographic info" are:


http://www.givinginstitute.org/news/250351/The-HIPAA-Privacy-Rule-What-Fundraisers-Need-to-Know.htm

http://connect.ahp.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=6b50190e-959c-4454-813e-8f2943c77d44


My personal opinion, based on reading, discussions, and my experience, has been to lean towards the latter interpretation.


When used, I've also seen the Patient ID stored in the SSN field, which I think is a brilliant move because it means you can never have the same Patient ID on multiple records. Visit info was limited to the most recent visit and stored as an attribute. I would be very cautious about keeping much in terms of visit info in RE because the quantity of data could grow far too quickly and may not be of much value for fundraising purposes (for example, a lab visit is not generally useful to have in RE).


Best of luck!

Sue,


Do you use NXT?  How are you HIPAA compliant?


Thanks.


Donna Bova

Donna Roy:

Does anyone have a standard practice for storing a donor's patient record number or date of encounter in the Raiser's Edge?

We had originally uploaded the MRNs for our donor society members so we could quickly confirm their identity when coming across on our daily census report. We used the phone category of "Others"  with a phone type of MRN but were told by compliance that we had to take them out because we were at risk of HIPPA violation.  It worked really well while utilizing them this way.  It could be just our organizations interpretation of HIPPA, just something to keep in mind.  Also, we use the Alias field for employee numbers and this has worked really well to identify employees who may have had a name change, etc.

 

Donna Bova:

Sue,


Do you use NXT?  How are you HIPAA compliant?


Thanks.


Donna Bova

We do not use NXT.  Yes, we are compliant.  We had to go through a lengthy process with the hospital compliance team and privacy officer to make sure the information we receive is allowable.  We are a state academic medical university in NY, so there were a lot of eyes on this before it was approved.

Sue

We store the patient ID as an Alias.. I don't know of any reports for which we use the number but it does distinguish our grateful patients from our regular donors. Unfortunately, NXT does not show Alais entries but I assume that is coming.


Mark Guncheon

Development IT Anaylst

Bon Secours Health System

Hi there


We have a separate database for our clients (we don't call them patients) and we store the unique ID from that database in the SSNum field which we've renamed to suit our purposes.


If you do go with the Alias option, be aware that they can be quite sticky and difficult to remove. I suggest the trial and test idea proffered by Jen (I think) earlier is especially important so that you don't end up with a whole bunch of Aliases that are difficult to remove en masse. (Global delete doesn't remove the line, just the data in the line, then leaving blank lines of both alias type and alias name).

I made the mistake of globally adding before testing and now I've got a whole stack of blank aliases when I made a global add!


Good luck!

Jen Claudy:

NXT does allow searching by Alias.

Jen Claudy:

Currently, the Alias field is not visible in NXT...but you can search by it.  In the NXT Idea Bank, this Idea, to show the Aliases on a record, is marked as [Under Consideration] so be sure to go add your votes!

@David Ritchie
Hi David.

We are a Medical Foundation attached to a hospital. We follow HIPPA with our grateful patient program. I am interested in finding out how you “segment” donors who are patients “within RE”? or even if that is considered HIPPA compliant.

Thanks

Potique

@Potique Johnson We used the Alias field and our medical records team removed either a beginning character or the last character of the medical record number before sending us the data. The remaining characters were similar enough to allow us to validate it was the correct record but not complete so as to jeopardize confidentiality.