Dental Health Professionals Responsibility for Compliance with HIPAA

One of the core values of the American Dental Hygiene Association’s Code of Ethics is patient confidentiality and respect for human beings. Although privacy and confidentiality are separate concepts, protecting the privacy of a patient’s information is essentially for confidentiality. In order to ensure protection, always remember to only access patient information that is required to perform the assigned job. Healthcare providers all realize that they only have the right to access the information necessary to do their jobs. This has commonly been referred to as “need to know” information. The HIPAA regulations refer to this as minimum necessary and the same concept holds true—only access patient information necessary to perform assigned job duties.

Recently, these regulations have been well publicized and discussed but it is important to remember and to tell the public that dental health professionals have always protected patient confidentiality. Mary Alice Gaston, RDH, MS, editor of The Journal of Dental Hygiene, provided excellent guidance for all dental professionals by stating “…all we really need to do is use common sense and handle everyone’s private health information as though it were our own.” 6

In addition to ensuring compliance for HIPAA, dental hygienists play an important role in educating patients on their privacy rights. Most of the time a patient spends in the dental chair is spent with their dental hygienist. Dental hygienists are in the perfect position to educate patients as well as other office staff about HIPAA.