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eMerit & Medical Justice Interview Series - Social Media and HIPAA Compliance. Visit us online at https://goo.gl/Ddj3Cx or call 877-633-5878.

Transcript:

Jeff: Many people, most people are on social media today. It includes Facebook, Instagram, etc. How should doctors think about interacting on Facebook, in particular when patients initiate the contact.

Mike: Ok, so we need to be very careful here because the Federation of State Medical Boards has given specific guidance to us. And if we want to listen to anyone we want to listen to the people that control our licenses to practice medicine, right? And so there are certain guidelines on what you can do and what you can't do and I think that it's not terribly difficult if it's explained to you and you have some policies in place. Certainly one area of mistake that I see people make is they think, oh if I just don't use the patient's name and I just don't show a photograph of the patient's face, everything will be ok because there's no possible way that anyone could ever link this up. And I'm here to tell you that people link things up and I can give you multiple examples of physicians having their license suspended for doing just something right along those lines.

Jeff: Alright, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up the hotrod case.
Would you be kind enough to educate our audience about the hotrod case where the patient's name was not released and a picture of his face was not released.

Mike: So, there was a patient that was having a gallbladder surgery and while being prepped for the surgery it was discovered that this patient had tattooed on his body, "hotrod." Well this was too exciting for the surgical staff and someone pulled out their smartphone and took a close up of the tattoo. And it was, no one told the patient at the time and the patient only found out about it some weeks later when contacted by media requesting an interview about his hotrod tattoo. So, that's an example of how it went from one person's smartphone to being on the national news.

Jeff: So what happened to that doctor?

Mike: The honest answer is it was not pretty, there were a number of different sanctions involved as well as remedial and there was a lawsuit. So, what happened involved attorneys and so I can always tell you that when attorneys are involved it's not a happy scenario.

Jeff: Certainly not in this particular case.

Mike: No, that's correct.

Jeff: Alright.

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eMerit & Medical Justice Interview Series - Social Media and HIPAA Compliance. Visit us online at https://goo.gl/Ddj3Cx or call 877-633-5878.