This webinar will cover the following benefits and applications of this material with the start of detailed speaker information to integrate education, training, and experience with detailed course objectives and disclaimers.

The webinar will then start with an overview of the core privacy requirements of HIPAA, the basics of which should be well-known and practiced by all health care practitioners. Then, the subject moves to the social media activities of health care practitioners – with a specific focus on the practice of nursing, which can include their own social media or the social media of others, such as a hospital or health care facility’s official social media. This webinar will continue with a brief summary of those basic HIPAA privacy protections then goes into detail on the many ways a health care provider may run afoul of the privacy exceptions via the use of social media. While not every kind of social media can be covered, the basic principles that words and photographs on any publicly accessible internet forum constitute a social media danger subject to a breach.

This will include recognized national organizations’ guidelines specifically for nurses on the dos and don’ts of social media as published by important sources of these standards. This webinar will include actual disciplinary actions from state licensure boards to be reviewed. These are found in real life, actual, contested cases from state boards of nursing, which regulate the practice of nursing in any given jurisdiction. Furthermore, examples of state laws that apply to licensed health care professionals that mandate confidentiality and will further examine how health care professionals’ licenses can be suspended or revoked for privacy violations in the course of using social media.

Finally, take a look at how the employment rules of the health care facility may impact the use of social media by the health care practitioner and are especially focused on the practice of nursing. While HIPAA may be the basis of an action for breach of patient privacy, the more common action is the employment discharge of a health care practitioner – simply being fired by their health care employer.

Course Level - Advanced

Who Should Attend

Health care practitioners, nurses, and attorneys. Health care and medical records offices and companies.

Why Should You Attend

Erase the fear, uncertainty, and doubt of social media violations and medical privacy with a unique focus on nursing and other health professions.  This new webinar and material reviews the specific pitfalls of HIPAA violations and confidentiality breaches by nurses and other practitioners in the health professions. This webinar focuses on nursing and gathers and summarizes nursing guidelines and rules from recognized national nursing organizations as well as state boards of nursing – the governmental licensing agencies with jurisdiction over the practice of nursing in each state.

This webinar focuses on the ways nurses and other health care professionals violate HIPAA confidentiality via social media by improperly revealing protected health care information in unexpected ways. Taking real-life disciplinary actions from state boards of nursing and other licensure boards, this informative webinar examines actual cases from those state licensure boards with an eye towards identifying real-life missteps and their consequences.

Disciplinary actions against nurses will be covered from actual, contested cases giving true meaning to the subject at hand. With social media violations now regularly occurring, standards and guidelines from national organizations will be reviewed to address them – all with the goal of preventative action so as to help nurses and other health care professionals stay out of trouble.

Learn from real-world examples collected from documentation and information obtained by state freedom of information laws as to state licensure board proceedings. Finally, while state licensure board disciplinary action is one consequence of a privacy breach, employment policies provide the underlying basis for firing a nurse or health care practitioner. Examples of core rules for employment policies and “dos and don’ts” in an employment setting will cover this topic.

Ten minutes will be reserved for Q and A at the end of the webinar, and e-mail questions may be submitted to the presenter.