4My Emergency

Archive for the ‘medical emergency’ Category

Are you aware of the medical privacy laws?

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule, the Privacy Rule, a Federal law, gives you rights over your health information and sets rules and limits on who can look at and receive your health information. These laws definitely protect your privacy, but they can as well keep your family from getting medical information on you in the event of an emergency. Even a spouse or eighteen year old child, without proper paperwork in place can leave you in the dark as far as their medical condition.

An example of a situation would be a spouse traveling on business to another city in the state, with a three hour drive from your home. He gets in an auto accident on the way home and is transported unconscious to the nearest hospital and is being attended by the best medical personal.

You are notified by the police that your spouse has been taken to their local hospital. You are very upset and want to know your spouse’s condition; you call the hospital to ask what is happening to him. The nurse in the hospital cannot release any medical information to you unless you have a HIPAA disclosure document executed by your spouse allowing you to know his medical information.

Now you are very nervous and you do not know anything about your spouse’s condition. You decide to drive to the hospital, a three hour drive, and the entire drive you do not know anything that is going on. Fortunately, when you get to the hospital your spouse is out of surgery and conscience. You spouse can now authorize you with the doctors to allow you to know their medical situation.

HIPAA protection protects everyone over the age 18 (your son or daughter even while in college) from disclosing your medical information. Please consider getting the appropriate paperwork in place before you your family members have a condition that can because you stress during medical emergencies. Get a HIPAA disclosure document executed on each family member at minimum if they want to have you know about their medical condition.

For a more complete protection there are three documents that can be easily executed for each family member that can properly protect your family for most common situations.

1. HIPAA Disclosure Document – Specifies who can be disclosed your medical information.
2. Medical Power of Attorney – Specifies who can make medical decisions on your behalf.
3. Living Will – Specifies your wishes regarding prolonging life medical treatments

The safe way to generate these three documents is work with your family lawyer to have them drawn up properly for your state. Please keep an electronic copy of the executed document in your email to ensure that you can get access to it when you need it or are not prepared to use it.

Avoid undue stress during an emergency, make sure you understand the HIPAA laws and prepare your family to work with the laws by having your documents in place.

This is, or could be, of vital importance to those of you who have emergency call systems or what is commonly known as “panic buttons” for contacting emergency help. If you have one of these plans, they appear to have a basic flaw under these conditions:

The “telephone” line used to send the panic signal to the monitoring station operates via a cable system, and There is a power outage at the time the emergency occurs.

Some providers are: LifeLink, LifeWatch USA, Pioneer Emergency Medical Alarms, Medical Alert, Life Station and Philips LifeLine, to name a few, and under most circumstance provide fantastic protection. However, if the electrical power goes out and an emergency happens where the wearer of the signaling device or “button” activates it, NO telephone call goes through.

Why, you ask? Because when the electricity goes out, so does the cable connection box which is powered by household current. This prevents the system from sending the emergency signal.

When these emergency systems were first developed, everyone had the “old” telephone systems provided by the Bell System, a subsidiary, a sister company, or an offshoot. They all carried the phone call through a dedicated telephone line, which is powered by the telephone company.

Many people have subsequently switched over to other types of providers, in particular cable companies who sell “bundled” services including TV cable, Internet and phone service. Unfortunately for our discussion, these require household power to operate. If the power goes off, so do the phones and with them the “panic button” stops working.

What happened for me to be writing this article? My mother has one of the emergency call systems. She lives independently, so it gives her a level of confidence that if she needs emergency help, it is as near as the necklace she wears in the house around her neck. And it gives us reassurance that if something happens, she can summon help immediately. She does have a computer and thus the internet, and she also has cable for her TV. In a cost saving move, she signed up for a bundled program where the total cost for all three through one provider was substantially less than buying each one individually. In doing so, she cancelled her Verizon phone line.

One afternoon, I heard over the radio that her neighborhood was in the midst of a power outage, so I called to find out how she was doing. The call would not go through. No phone service. Then I recalled that in working on her computer, I discovered that everything went through the cable router.

Putting this all together I determined that during the outage she could not make outgoing calls because her phones needed house electricity to work. By itself this is not really bad, but in thinking about it, I wondered the impact on the emergency call system. I made a few phone calls to several of the above mentioned emergency service providers and they readily acknowledged that their systems do not work with a phone system that requires house power (such as the cable systems) when the power goes out.

This is not a call to panic; these systems work most of the time just fine. This is an unanticipated situation that developed through improvements in technology and cost savings afforded by newer systems.

Customers who continue to have phone service by the “phone company” have no problems and neither will the others until the power goes out. Does it go out often? For most people the answer is no, it does not. But it is a risk. Coverage is not 100% if the user opts for cable-type providers. Should emergency call providers inform customers of these facts? I think so. At least customers should be made aware that if they subscribe to the system and do not have “phone company” service, there may be service interruptions. Likewise, customers with “phone company” service when signing up for systems should be warned that if they change providers, they may have service interruptions if they lose electricity.

So, what are the options and what do we do about it? Below is a summary of what I think they are, but for us (to help with Mom’s peace of mind too) we will reconnect the telephone company phone service with a very basic and inexpensive system (no long distance, caller ID or any frills) and dedicate that to the emergency system. She will continue to have the cable phone for all other calls, long distance and so on. This will give us an added benefit of a way to contact her in the event of a power outage as well as guarantee she will always have an active emergency system.

Options:

If the home where you are concerned about the emergency call system has regular telephone service, there is nothing to do. However, you should be aware that if you (or the person living in that home) decide to change providers, you may have service interruptions if you or they lose electric power. If the home has cable-service telephone connection, consider adding a telephone line. For some this expense may not be possible. In that event, everyone should be aware that during a power outage there will be a lapse in coverage and try to make personal contact regularly with the home. Basically, live with it. If the home has cable-service telephone connection and adding a line is not possible, make sure the people in the home keep their cell phone on their person as the backup to the emergency system. Someone may have to program 911 into the phone. In addition, the phone will have to be kept charged at all times. (One reason this is not an option for us, Mom’s cell phone is not her priority.) During my research I did find at least one company that offers an addition to their basic emergency service that provides a panic button for use away from the home. It uses the same sort of communication technology that cell phones use. I did not price it out, but it may be an alternative to use around the home in the event of a power outage.

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