HIPAA Blog

[ Friday, June 12, 2020 ]

Can a provider contact patients who have tested positive for Covid-19 and encourage them to donate blood and/or plasma? The answer is yes, so long as it does not meet the definition of marketing (or if it does, meets an exception). OCR has just issued guidance specifically on this issue.

How do you do this? A quick guide would be to follow the following steps:

Make (and document) an internal determination that improving blood and plasma donation by Covid-19 survivors would benefit population health, case management, and care coordination of the provider. This means showing how there's a patient benefit specific to your practice and your patients generally (but not a specific patient -- then it becomes treatment).
Don't recommend a specific blood bank if you can avoid it. If you're recommending a general activity but not a particular service or provider, then it's easier to argue that it's not marketing.
If you need to refer to a specific provider (or if your geographic area only has one or a few blood banks), do not take money from that provider.
Don't let a third party make the disclosure for you, unless it's a business associate (like your management company).
Do not give a list of your patients who have had Covid-19 to the blood bank to send out.

The OCR guidance is here, and the press release is here.

Jeff [12:37 PM]

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