[Transcript] Episode 514: Google Vids: Is It The HIPAA Friendly Version of Loom?

 

Evan Dumas 

You’re listening to Group Practice Tech, a podcast by Person Centered Tech, where we help mental health group practice owners ethically and effectively leverage tech to improve their practices. I’m your co-host, Evan Dumas.

 

Liath Dalton 

And I’m Liath Dalton, and we are Person Centered Tech.

 

Liath Dalton 

This episode is brought to you by Therapy Notes. Therapy Notes is a robust online practice management and electronic health record system to support you in growing your thriving practice. Therapy Notes is a complete practice management system with all the functionality you need to manage client records, meet with clients remotely, create rich documentation, schedule appointments and bill insurance all right at your fingertips. To get two free months of Therapy Notes as a new Therapy Notes user go to therapynotes.com and use promo code PCT.

 

Evan Dumas 

Hello and welcome to Episode 514: Google Vids: Is It the HIPAA Friendly Version of Loom?

 

Liath Dalton 

This is a great question that came into us from one of our group practice leaders. And the, sort of, context for the question, if you haven’t been following along, or heard us or colleagues talk about it before, is that Loom is this awesomely slick video recording and screen capture and video editing tool, that just works really fantastically well, and has been an amazing tool for people to be able to make training videos.

 

Liath Dalton 

And you know, sometimes, if someone is stuck and needs help troubleshooting something, you can much more efficiently respond to them with just doing a screen capture and narration, rather than a long email with a bunch of links and all kinds of things like that, right? It just can make things more efficient and effective. You know, we love those things.

 

Liath Dalton 

But the caveat is that Loom is not a service provider that will do a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement.

 

Evan Dumas 

No.

 

Liath Dalton 

So it’s been limited in how it can actually really be deployed in a practice context, right? There, and so it’s required more workarounds to be able to use it for things like, and this is what the question asker brought up, does this mean I could actually do training videos in my EHR, for staff? And yes, it does – in fact looked me actually back up here.

 

Liath Dalton 

So Google Vids is part of the Google Drive suite now. So for paid Google Workspace users, it is also specifically included in the HIPAA functionality.

 

Evan Dumas 

Mm, nice.

 

Liath Dalton 

So that means your HIPAA Business Associate Agreement with Google covers all of the functionality of Google Vids as well. So it makes it a HIPAA acceptable tool to utilize.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

I think, which is massively exciting.

 

Evan Dumas 

Oh, yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

Of course, there are some important things to remember, though, and usage notes.

 

Liath Dalton 

Because, remember, the product or service being compliance compatible is only one part of the equation. The other part of the equation for what makes something compliant or not is that we’re using it in a compliant manner.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yes, yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

And so, before everyone just dives in to making all the training videos for their teams that they have felt limited on being able to make up to now, we wanted to give a few key reminders on on usage notes.

 

Liath Dalton 

So HIPAA has this concept of the Minimum Necessary Standard, which is really important and central. And what it basically means, is that no team member should have access to Protected Health Information that they don’t need in order to fulfill their role within the practice. And which isn’t, you know, when we’re talking about clinicians, an example of this is clinicians only should have access to their assigned clients records within EHR, right?

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, yep.

 

Liath Dalton 

And they also shouldn’t even have access to the demographic info of other team members, clients, right?

 

Evan Dumas 

No, not ideally.

 

Liath Dalton 

So, Evan, where am I going with this? How does this translate to recording, recording, screen capture training videos in an EHR?

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, yeah. So when you’re doing training videos, a problem in the past has been, oh, no, what if, what if I see some PHI? So that’s why you couldn’t use Loom, because it’d be handling client info.

 

Evan Dumas 

And now the concern is, okay, so, yeah, it’s covered under the included functionality you can see handle PHI, but if you’ve got a whole bunch of clients being shown in a training video, which might be shown to a whole bunch of people, you’ve got some circumstances where it isn’t really minimum necessary. You’re taking this client’s info and sort of spreading it across all of your folks, without, you know, informing the client that their information may be used for training purposes. Or maybe, you know, everyone’s seeing it, which is not necessary, unfortunately.

 

Liath Dalton 

No, and I would argue, and think that Eric, the attorney that we collaborate with, would also make this argument, that it doesn’t fall under the incidental or accidental

 

Evan Dumas 

Oh, no.

 

Liath Dalton 

Disclosure piece, right? It is, it is purposeful. It’s something that could absolutely be mitigated. So what does this mean, then? Well, when doing training videos, ideally you want to be using a test client.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

Like a mock client that you’ve made up specifically to be able to use for these demo purposes, so that you aren’t unnecessarily exposing Protected Health Information without it being what qualifies as an authorized Release of Information, which is really what, what this disclosure would be. Would be a release of authorized, that would require authorization.

 

Liath Dalton 

So, the nice thing is that part of the functionality in the editing suite of tools are the ability to put screen overlays.

 

Evan Dumas 

Oh nice.

 

Liath Dalton 

So you can screen capture, you know, the whole information.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

But then you can block certain things out. So let’s say you record a video, and then you’re doing your diligent review of, okay, what information was exposed, as well as, did the did the video record everything I want to, need it to. And in your editing process, you can just put little image overlays that block things out that shouldn’t be shown.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

Right? And you can do like a color block. You can then do a text overlay, so you could describe what the information, the generic information that is being redacted is. So be like, This is where the name it field is, for example.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yes, yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

So that it can still contain all of the training information that you need to be imparting to your team members, but not be violating the Minimum Necessary Standard.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

So of course, you want to make it easier for yourself too. And in terms of the editing process, so you don’t have too much redacting to do, which is why we say you still want to be using a test client. But of course, there are so many places in the EHR where, if you’re going through a whole tutorial, other info may come up if you’re, you know, showing navigating from the main dashboard or a whole host of circumstances, right?

 

Liath Dalton 

So in the event that that occurs, and any client info is displayed, just use the editing tools to be able to redact that information but still describe the generic information that would be there. So it’s still a useful training tool, and not limited in that way.

 

Liath Dalton 

So this is hugely exciting, because it means that, that you can have comprehensive trainings for your team on really important functionality and how to use it correctly within your practice’s systems, and that that is a uniform training.

 

Liath Dalton 

We, but this is one thing we talk about as being really beneficial in a group practice context, is that everyone is equipped with the same knowledge base for their role and support tools. So this is one way to provide for that. And it makes things so much more efficient for practice leadership as well, to be able to just have this training that folks go through, particularly at onboarding, right, or for ongoing training needs that you’re not having to repeat it over and over individually.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

And that then means that the time that you invest in making it comprehensive and accurate the first time is going to pay dividends in the long run as well. So we’re really excited that this feature is available through Google Workspace and is included in the HIPAA covered functionality, and hope that it brings some efficiency and additional effectiveness to your practice operations and team management workflow.

 

Liath Dalton 

But just keep those really important reminders in mind when, when utilizing it.

 

Evan Dumas 

Mhm.

 

Liath Dalton 

Again, those are don’t forget the Minimum Necessary Standard and make sure you really do review the contents of a recording before sharing it with other team members.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

Um, to make sure that info that shouldn’t be displayed is not displayed.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, yeah. That sounds pretty easy to do.

 

Liath Dalton 

Pretty easy to do, yeah. Evan, how many times have we had to redact something from, from, from videos?

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, pretty frequently. I’ll open a wrong tab and it shows a group name, and I’ll have to go back and hide it, and it’s, you know, the tools that we use are not as slick as Google Vids, so who knows. Maybe we’ll switch to that at some point. I don’t know if it’ll work for our circumstance, but hey, yeah, it could be great.

 

Liath Dalton 

Well, and, I mean, that’s something you can do with the overlays in Loom as well.

 

Evan Dumas 

True.

 

Liath Dalton 

Um, but of course, you don’t want to be using Loom for recording PHI anyway, because that original video file with that PHI that would need to be redacted would still be held by that service provider, right?

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

So this is, all that to say, inadvertently exposing info when you’re doing an initial video recording take, when you’re working across a lot of different systems, is easy to do, so do a review to make sure something didn’t sneak in there and caught it, and then you’ll you’ll be good to go.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yep, yep, no problem at all.

 

Liath Dalton 

And one, one last thing, and sort of additional pro tip, is referring back to other functionality that’s included through Google Workspace, which are Google Sites. And how to use a Google Site as an intra site for your team, where you can embed those training videos. Where only they have access to them, and you can make a whole onboarding training section page, embed your the relevant chapters from your workforce security manual and your employee manual, etc.

 

Liath Dalton 

I think we’ve done a prior podcast episode

 

Evan Dumas 

I think so.

 

Liath Dalton 

about Google Sites and how awesome they can be.

 

Evan Dumas 

I think so.

 

Liath Dalton 

So we’ll find that prior episode and put that in the show notes too so you can refer to that, because the kind of the combo of these two things is what really levels up the training management aspect for your team, in terms of internal trainings.

 

Liath Dalton 

And then another resource that we’ll be highlighting is the Onboarding and Offboarding With Compliance and Ease in Mind free workshop that we have, and that actually shows how easy it is to create a Google Site, embed policies and procedures.

 

Evan Dumas 

Ooh, yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

And now the addition is just, and you can record Google Vids. Maybe we’ll do another little an update for that.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, yeah.

 

Liath Dalton 

So, just because this is really exciting functionality to have available now.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, definitely.

 

Liath Dalton 

Well, thanks for joining us, folks, and we’ll talk to you next week.

 

Evan Dumas 

Yeah, talk to you next week, everybody.

 

Liath Dalton 

This has been Group Practice Tech. You can find us at personcenteredtech.com. For more podcast episodes, you can go to personcenteredtech.com/podcast, or click podcast on the menu bar.