Case Study: Administrative Safeguards
You are the technologist in charge of the hematology section in a hospital laboratory. The laboratory manager and the pathologist who oversee the laboratory's Quality Management Program have asked you to review blood count results for 100 patients as part of an internal quality assurance project. You review only the clinical findings in the electronic medical record that are relevant to this study and correlate the findings with the laboratory results. The QA report that you develop does not include any personal information, such as patient names.
The following week, you get a call from your hospital security officer. She says that a routine computer system audit has revealed that you accessed the records of 100 patients and she would like to know why.
What would be a correct response to her concern, considering the reason you accessed the information?
Please select the single best answer