Week 2 Discussion 1 Health information services

Respond to your classmates. Your grade will reflect both the quality of your initial post and the depth of your responses. Reference the Discussion Forum Grading Rubric for guidance on how your discussion will be evaluated.

Health Records
Pretend you supervise the correspondence unit of the health information services department of a medical center. Today, you received a subpoena duces tectum from an attorney, demanding either the originals or copies of all health records concerning Mary Smith, who allegedly is or was a patient of the medical center. The subpoena lacks sufficient information for you to determine whether Mary Smith is or was a patient in your facility. The subpoena is not accompanied by a valid authorization to release information for Mary Smith, as required in your state. (Case Study, p. 62)

How should you respond to the subpoena? In addition to providing the legal rational for your response, describe the necessary information the subpoena should have included. Assuming Mary Smith was a patient at the facility, who has ownership over her health record – Mary Smith or the medical center?

Guided Response: Review several of your classmates’ posts. Provide a substantive response to at least two of your peers. Discuss with your classmates the issue of health record ownership. Should the record be owned solely by the patient, the provider, or the health plan? Which is most beneficial in the long term?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.