Question:
Do we filter out patients flagged as "Confidential"?
For context-
CRMC ED Director-
"We've gotten some phone calls about patients in the ER who are confidential. The family members say they're receiving texts, but when we look them up, they are confidential. I believe a couple of nights ago, a woman came in and didn't want her husband to know. She was confidential, but he was receiving texts, so he found out where she was."
Additional context regarding confidential patients from Optum:
Good Afternoon,
Confidential status automatically for:
Prisoners
Patients in Police Custody
Patient involved in DV or Violent Crime
At the time of full registration, each patient who does not meet one of the above requirements, will be asked if they would like to be in Confidential Status; asking them if it is okay for them to have visitors while they are here. If they say no, they would be placed in Confidential Status and explain that if someone comes in looking for them, we would have to tell the visitor that they are not here.
This entails the registration staff to update MS4; change the confidentiality flag to "Y" within patients MS4 encounter.
Hope this helps. Let me know if further information/clarification is needed.
Answer:
It's definitely something we want to be doing but it would depend how this comes across in the HL7.
We currently filter based on the reason for visit so if there was a value here that corresponded to confidential patients, we could look to filter patients based on this value.
If it's contained within another field that isn't currently mapped to the Redox JSON output, we would be able to extract this once we're using Rhapsody and map it to a field we could use.
- Does automatic confidential status or indicating Y for the MS4 confidentiality flag put any type of block on the patient phone number in the system -No, patients will still receive text messages.
- Is there also a confidentiality flag that exists in Cerner -MS4 speaks to Cerner - a yellow star will appear on the ED tracker = Do not publish.