The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on February 23rd, 2010 by tasha
Search engines love blogs. Having a blog means that your website gets updated on a regular basis. It also adds content on topics of interest to your customers. The more useful the content, the more likely it is that others will link to you. With one tool, therefore, you are able to hit three of the top five factors that will boost your ranking in a search engine result.
Blogs are fun and easy. Of all the social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) a blog is quick and casual, requiring very little computer knowledge. If you know Word, you will be able to find your way through a blog application, and can even post pictures and videos if you have them available in your archives.
A blog is not a small project, however. Where your business website is like a fish (set up the aquarium and then it needs relatively minimal maintenance), a blog is like a puppy. It needs to be monitored daily and you need to post on it regularly. (I would say once a week.) Your articles do not have to be long. And they can be more commentary and opinion, rather than a fact-based research article. Still, you do need to have a writer who can take a factoid or two and produce 200-300 words of fairly interesting content on a regular basis. Many hospices have closet writers on their staff. Ask around. You may be surprised.
Because a blog invites comments from readers, you need to be ready with policies in place to address negative comments, and assure that protected health information is not revealed by staff, or by the commenters themselves. (Think HIPAA.) Safeguards can easily be put in place to handle both, but it takes some preparation and forethought before you jump in and start blogging.
If you would like to learn more about blogging (and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for that matter), please come to the Pre-Conference workshop Social Media and Hospice (PC-05) that I will be co-presenting at the NHPCO Management and Leadership Conference with 3 other in-the-trenches hospice social media folk: David Cherry (of NHPCO); Susan Wallace (of the Ohio Hospice and Palliative Care Organization); and Liza Paul of The Mount Carmel Hospice.
Written on February 17th, 2010 by tasha
The new HITECH regs went into effect today. Most particularly, these include:
I’d love to hear what folks are doing to accommodate the new regs. Please comment!
In preparation for this day, I have recently been researching HIPAA and thought I might share some insights. Understand, I am not a lawyer. And my System Administrator will tell you, with the kindest, gentlest smile on his face, that I know enough to be dangerous. With those disclaimers in mind, therefore, here is my lay person’s take on performing a HIPAA tune-up.
HIPAA was originally written to protect the kind of information that would be in an electronic health record. However as a “covered entity” (and now your business associates also), privacy protections extend to anything that is considered “Protected Health Information” (PHI). While you might think that PHI includes things like diagnoses and treatment information, the definition is much broader. There is a very long list, but some examples of PHI include the obvious and not so obvious:
If I’m understanding correctly, any quasi-unique piece of data that might be used to trace back to the actual identity of the individual, even if it is NOT linked to medical treatment or diagnostic information, is considered PHI. Some compliance experts I have spoken with say that even the name of a relative is considered PHI. Working with family caregivers as I do, this is important to know.
Providing HIPAA protection involves 3 components:
With the new HITECH rules, these protections become like a string of mirrors, as the covered entity needs to be sure the business associate has protections in these three domains, and business associates need to be sure their business associates have protections who in turn…you get the picture.
The policies and physical protections are elements you will need to construct internally. In shopping for assistance for my own business, I was impressed with the consultative offerings of Trustwave. They are not set up for smaller operations (sadly, no templates for standard policies are available). But for larger enterprises, they seemed to provide a comprehensive service to assist with HIPAA compliance. Like much of the tech security industry, they are oriented around securing sensitive financial information, such as online credit card transactions. Their particular acronym for that is PCI (Payment Card Information). But many of the PCI protections actually apply to medical information and PHI, so companies such as Trustwave have expanded to include HIPAA services as well.
The technology component, especially if you do not have a large operation, will require that you contract with a specialized Internet Service Provider that is versed in the necessary protections and can provide you with logs, incident reporting, periodic security audits, etc. A simple, common sense precaution is to keep your sensitive data separated from other online data, such as your company website. The good news with this separation is that you don’t need to contract for space and traffic large enough to encompass all your Internet activities, just those that involve PHI.
Just to give you sampling of what’s out there, in my own shopping for the technology side I ran across 3 services that caught my eye:
This is by no means an exhaustive list. And I’m sure there are many other services out there. It just seemed appropriate to share some of the findings I came across in my own HIPAA tune-up in case they might prove useful for you.
Happy HITECH DAY!
Tasha
P.S. For more information on the new regulations, I would suggest the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s HIPAA-HITECH tip sheet and a superb HIPAA-HITECH presentation prepared by the law office of Hogan & Hartsen.
Written on February 11th, 2010 by tasha
Useful insights from the new report by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving.
Caregiving research has long pointed out that subjective perception of stress has the strongest impact for family caregivers. Certainly, physical strain is consequential. But two caregivers can engage in the same level of care, same tasks, and spend the same amount of time, yet one can perceive it as fine while another finds it overwhelming.
Even when the baseline health of the caregiver is taken into account, it is those family members who feel stressed and overwhelmed who also incur greater health problems (including higher mortality rates) than those who do not consider themselves stressed. Caregiver strain is VERY important.
The National Alliance for Caregiving 2009 study of family caregivers found that:
On the good news side, nearly half report a level of stress that is manageable. But it is those in the high stress category that need attention and may well be looking for help.
Specific groups are more likely to report high levels of stress. Below I include those subpopulations mentioned by the report, along with my own commentary based on the caregiving literature:
What programs do you have that might be especially supportive and help you reach these high-stress/high-risk caregivers?
Written on February 8th, 2010 by tasha
Find out at the NHPCO PreConference April 21.
While there has been a lot of publicity about the swelling ranks of Boomers on Facebook, the demographics deserve a closer look. I will be co-presenting at this 3 hour workshop on Social Media and Hospice (PC05), offered in conjunction with the NHPCO Management and Leadership Conference in Washington, DC this April. Joining me will be in-the-trenches social marketing hospice folks David Cherry (NHPCO), Susan Wallace (Ohio Hospice and Palliative Care Organization) and Liza Paul (Mount Carmel Hospice).
This very practical course is designed to help you make wise strategy decisions. The focus will be on setting realistic objectives for several different departments that might benefit from the unique strengths of social media:
This overview workshop includes topics designed help you chart a course in the dynamic, but sometimes intimidating world of Web 2.0:
No programming experience is needed! (In fact, we we’ll be talking strategy the whole time. No HTML allowed!)
There are many advantages to participating in social media, not the least of which is increased exposure and search engine optimization for your company website.
If you have any questions about the session, by all means, contact me. I’d be happy to answer them: tasha@elderpagesonline.com
Or post them as comments here.
