The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires healthcare employees to use or share only the “minimum necessary” information they “need to know” to do their jobs. For example, a coder needs to look at the entire record of a patient’s hospital stay to apply all the correct codes. However, perusing the correspondence section of the record is unnecessary and inappropriate.

MSPs are optimistic that their working conditions will go back to normal once the pandemic is over. Almost 70% of MSPs said they will return to working onsite when it is safe to do so.

A United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina (the “Court”) ruled in favor of a plaintiff, finding that when an organization adversely affects a person’s future job prospects based on a condition protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), it may count as retaliation. In ruling in favor of the plaintiff, the Court found that issues of material fact existed and therefore allowed several claims to proceed to trial, granting in part and refusing in part the defendant’s requests for summary judgments.

The #MeToo movement has encouraged a wide range of industries that once looked at sexual harass­ment as “part of the job” to start taking steps to im­prove working conditions. Healthcare is among those industries that are not only finally recognizing the extent of the problem but looking for ways to prevent this behavior in the future.