Pulmonology Coding Alert

Question: We had a consultant come to the office who told our front desk staff to create scripts to deal with common HIPAA questions. That way we can answer consistently. Is this a standard practice?

Codify Subscriber

Answer: It’s somewhat standard practice to have uniform responses to patient questions. Although HIPAA patient privacy laws have been around for years now, any practice can tell you that patients ask questions about HIPAA now and then. Making sure that your staff can provide your patients with quick and accurate answers is vital, and you can improve those odds if you create pre-written responses for the staff members to follow.

Essentially, scripting refers to preparing responses in anticipation of certain patient questions or scenarios.

For example, when patients come into your office, your employees can use a script to present them with your notice of privacy practices and to answer common questions they may have regarding the form.

Keep in mind that you can have all the scripts in the world, but it’s not going to prepare your employees for situations where they don’t understand what the policies are. Therefore, strategies like scripting must go hand-in-hand with an entity’s ability to train its staff in the ways of HIPAA. If your frontline employees simply don’t understand the fundamentals of privacy compliance or your organization’s policies and procedures concerning patient privacy, then there’s little hope that a script is going to provide them or your patients with any relief.

One of the first mistakes you’re liable to make when preparing scripts for your practice is to create them without consulting your workforce members. Receiving staff input on scripts is vital because you want to put it in their words. After all, it’s your employees who are going to be most likely delivering these scripts, so they’d better be the ones most comfortable with what they’re going to say.

Training tip:  Your practice can host round-table lunches during which groups of employees can be presented with a scenario and asked to brainstorm ways that they might respond to that situation. Essentially, then, the activity is designed to come up with the script — or scripts — that work best for that group.

The telltale sign of a good script is that it ensures what your frontline staffers communicate to your patients is both consistent and appropriate. If a patient were to ask the same question to different receptionists from the morning, afternoon and evening shifts, then that patient should receive a similar response for each and every time.

You should tailor your scripts to your office’s most frequently-asked questions and your staff members’ comfort levels. For instance, when an individual is handed a notice of privacy practices, he or she may ask what the notice is and why it is being provided. A good answer might be:

“This is a notice that is being provided pursuant to federal privacy law that requires us to tell you how we will use your health information and it also tells you what rights you have regarding your own health information.”

If all staff members use that same verbiage, consumers will get standard information across the board.