HIPAA Social Media Rules: How to Make Your Healthcare Organization Facebook Page Comply with the Policy

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) was launch in the United States to protect patients and healthcare organizations by implementing data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information.

Social media websites like Facebook made a huge impact on how businesses operate. Since their inception, audience reach grew exponentially and businesses are able to interact with their target audience even without seeing them in person.

This is a similar case for Pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare organizations. Social media enables them to connect with their patients and communicate relevant information easily.

With the convenience these social media provide for healthcare providers, they are still prone to hacking and other irrelevant interventions that aim to expose confidential medical data that put both the provider and patient’s sensitive information at risk.

So how would a pharmaceutical company that runs a Facebook page comply with HIPPA policy?

In this post, Poxse Digital Marketing puts up a guide for healthcare organizations on how to comply with these rules while using a Facebook page.

According to HIPAA Journal:

“The first rule of using social media in healthcare is to never disclose protected health information on social media channels.”

The question is, how to avoid disclosing protected health information in a Facebook page?

In this series, we will show you how to take advantage of your Facebook page’s page moderation section.

List all the possible words, phrases, adjectives or anything that is relevant to a protected health data

No one can avoid someone from commenting to a post made by a Facebook page. This puts a healthcare organization’s page at risk of violating the policy and getting apprehended by law. This is when the comment blocking feature comes in.

By listing all possible words that will raise a red flag, one can eliminate the need of tracking down comments that may put the page at risk. It also saves a lot of time and effort. It can also be expanded over time to cover more grounds.

In listing the words, a simple excel file can provide all the convenience.

Log in to your Facebook Page and put all the listed words in the “Page Moderation” section

After logging in, follow these steps:

Settings>General>Page Moderation

Then copy and paste your listed words in the box. Do not forget to add comma after each word.

Once done, save your settings and observe what will happen. This will lessen the chance of getting unwanted comments that may put the page and the whole organization at risk of getting penalized by HIPPA rules.

As effective as it is, keeping a close eye to the page and how it interacts is still imperative to avoid future risks. And remember to expand the list of moderated words for maximum security. Always keep in mind that healthcare data protection is always at risk.