Have you ever wondered how to respond to a review without divulging private or medical information? HIPAA Compliance is a big concern for the healthcare and law industries, and many do not know the rules behind review responses. Below we will give some advice.
What is HIPAA?
HIPAA is short for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. It is designed to keep protected health information safe as well as patient privacy. Personal Health information can be referred to as PHI. It refers to all individual health information including first name, last name, birthday, or address. All of these can potentially identify a patient.
HIPAA violations are serious as they range from $100 to $50,000 per day depending on the severity.
Tips for HIPAA Compliant Responses to Reviews
- Keep your response simple. Do not use the patient’s name, any kind of service they received. Just try to respond with any information already mentioned by the reviewer.
- Avoid referring to any PHI in your response.
Attorney Brandon Hewitt of Michigan Auto Law says, “As attorneys, even more, concerning than HIPAA would be the inadvertent disclosure of confidential or privileged information. We are strictly bound by attorney/client privilege, and only the client can waive this privilege, so not only do we have to be sure to protect any private health information, we need to make sure our response to a review does not reveal any information regarding the details of the reviewer’s incident, any conversation they had with our firm or any other private information that is not already disclosed by the reviewer themselves or known to the general public. Thus, a law firm’s responses to a review generally (must) stay very general and macro-level.”
You Can Respond to Patient Reviews with ReviewInc!
ReviewInc allows medical offices to respond to Facebook and Google reviews from patients from within the software with our partnership.
Regarding other review sites, you can log in from ReviewInc software and use our newly renamed Response Manager to leave a response. An easy way to remain compliant is to use our Response Creator, which provides automated templates for a HIPAA compliant response. In addition, we have also created a Response Library where you can create and store responses for future use. A word of caution, it is best to personalize all responses to reviews, so please make sure all responses are unique. These tools provide HIPAA guidelines that set everyone up for success.
ReviewInc is also the only third-party verified reputation management software, and we just received our certification from HIPAAMart for 2021.
With ReviewInc, you can monitor, respond, share as well as gather more reviews to boost your business’ revenue. To see a demo today, fill out our form and one of our account executives will reach out to you soon!
