Dr. Jones wrote: > Anyone on the list involved with HIPAA, in healthcare records? > > I am a chiropractor and am wondering about using a mailing list among > patients, not wanting to create any problems or HIPAA violations.
I don't know the legal ramifications, but here's my two cents. If it's just an announcement list, for you to send out health info, absolutely no problem. Don't make the member list public, make it just for list admins and you're fine, there's no disclosure of the other patients at all. If you've got email addresses for your patients now, you could send out a one time message, announcing the list and its purpose and stating that if they want to join, to go to the website or to send an email to, etc. After that, just make sure that when patients fill in their email address on one of your forms or wherever, that it says that you're going to add them to your mailing list. If it's going to be discussion tho, make sure that your patients know, make it very clear in the initial one time message. Posting to a discussion list will reveal the patient's email address and possibly their identity, home address, phone number, etc. depending on how much info is publicly tied to their email address. So just be sure they know it's a discussion list and that in posting, they may be revealing their identity. Also, I suggest making the list confirm + approve, so that you can verify that people wanting to join are current patients - or if you're going to make it open to the public, make sure your patients know that. You might also consider having two lists, one for announcements only and one for discussion and announcements and on whatever your patients fill in their email address, add a couple checkboxes for the announcement list and the discussion/announcement list. hth, texas critter -- EL-M FAQ: http://www.emaillist-managers.com/ ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/
