Accidental disclosure of PHI includes sending an email to the wrong recipient and an employee accidentally viewing a patient’s report, which leads to an unintentional HIPAA violation.

You will need to explain which patient’s records were viewed or disclosed. The failure to report such a breach promptly can turn a simple error into a major incident, one that could result in disciplinary action and potentially, penalties for your employer.

If a breach of confidential information happens ever to you, here are the steps we recommend you to take to make the experience as painless as possible:

1. Report the leak.
2. Temporarily refrain from sharing important information.
3. Identify the cause of the information leak.
4. Patch security vulnerabilities.
5. Own up to the mistake.

Q: HIPAA does not address faxing patient information specifically, but, like any form of health information, it is protected under the privacy rule. Health care professionals need to understand that faxed patient information can easily fall into the wrong hands, which would be a violation of privacy.

Answer: Yes. The Privacy Rule allows covered health care providers to share protected health information for treatment purposes without patient authorization, as long as they use reasonable safeguards when doing so. These treatment communications may occur orally or in writing, by phone, fax, e-mail, or otherwise.

A fax machine sends and receives messages through a phone line. In the past, you would have needed a line separate from your regular phone line for your fax machine. Now, a second line is not necessary. You must use a traditional land line, not a cellphone number.

When sending or receiving a fax, documents that contain mostly text usually take approximately 1 minute per page. For documents that contain graphics (e.g. scans of documents), or for faxes that are being sent through a slow phone line, it may take 5 minutes per page or more to be sent or delivered.

How to know if a fax was sent? You can tell if a fax is completely transmitted (and received by the other fax machine) if your fax has printed a confirmation page. It is a page that summarizes the time and date, number of pages, and destination fax number.