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Sharing Images That Are Not From Your Facility
We’ve got a debate going on right now. Is it legal for one facility that gets images from another outside facility to send them to a different outside facility? I know this doesn’t make sense probably. I’ll put it like this. You are Facility 1. Facility 2 sends Facility 1 an exam. Is it legal for Facility 1 to send that exam from Facility 2 to a Facility 3? We have several in the camp of it is not legal but a few in leadership who say it’s just fine. I side on it is not legal. If someone has a quick link to a reputable site that states if it is or not I would greatly appreciate it.
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10 Replies
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Having had this same debate in a previous role, we landed on the decision that if the patient requested their imaging be sent to Facility 3, then everything could go including the imaging from Facility 2. But if Facility 3 was the source of the request, only that which we had captured at Facility 1 would be sent.
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Thank you for your insight! I would agree that would be a great plan. Of all the of the times I’ve been asked about sending images from facility 2 to facility 3 it has not been the patient requesting it.
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That’s a Q for a healthcare lawyer. What consent or HIPAA exemption is used to disclose PHI to facility 3 ?
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Continuity of care of course 🙂 The catch all of reason 🙂
Quote from fw
That’s a Q for a healthcare lawyer. What consent or HIPAA exemption is used to disclose PHI to facility 3 ?
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the images are owned by the patient. If they consent / desire the images to be sent elsewhere it is their decision.
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if the patient requests priors and has previously send her priors to us, they get forwarded along with ours for continuity of care
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I don’t send the images (on CD) because I do not want it to look like that imaging was done at our facility. If a patient asks for a copy of their images (done at another facility, this has been done because they lost their disc or the other facility has closed, etc..), we will burn another CD but it would be on a handwritten CD that does not have our facilities label.
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The big thing I have going on is it is not the patient requesting them. It is another clinic that is sorta affiliated with my facilities that want us to send a volume of exams that we receive from an outside facility to their pacs system. The patient really doesn’t know what’s going on I’m assuming. Since these providers see patients at several locations in several different systems and do not provide their own imaging in many of the clinics, they just assume that facilities can just juggle all these exams around to get into their pacs. They really need to establish a connection is my opinion with the facility they want us pushing everything through to them.
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in that case, nope -I would only send our images
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I agree with this. I would not send them.
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