Private Information

When I worked at Long Term Care Partners, who have a government contract and are administrators for federal benefits and as part of our training we had to take many online training modules and pass a test at the end. There are so many strict rules that we as a company have to follow in order to protect our customer’s personal information and limited information can be given through an email. It is important to follow the rules with someone’s identity and to protect each customer that we have strict rules that we need to follow when communicating with them. Whether it is over the phone or by email we must be aware of what our limitations are and today I helped a gentlemen who is stationed in Iraq learn what his options are for helping him solve the problem he had. Since he is in Iraq and probably does not have a lot of time to spend communicating with us I sent him a certificate of permission that he could send our office that gives his wife permission to speak on his behalf. If she called up without this authorization in his file then we would have to insist that he gets in touch with us or fill out the form.

I am on the email team so we are the first point of contact for people who are surfing the website called Benefeds and we are only allowed to advise them on what to do. We use templates that are already made up and we answer everything and anything that has to do with any type of insurance even if the question does not apply to dental and vision we come up with something. We cannot go in and make any changes to their information that person has to call up to update us of any changes that cannot be done over the computer. Sometimes people lock themselves out and contact us and think we will just go in and unlock their account because they asked us to do it. We must ask them to call us and let them know that the customer service reps. will be able to answer their questions in more detail.

We have to follow the Hippa Privacy Act and there are different levels on fines depending on what laws have been broken, in our training class I learned that if a breach affects more than 500 people of any particular state, notice must also be provided to the media (Benefeds Training, 2010). Health and Human Services will also have to be notified as well and we have a privacy officer who will determine if an incident is an actual privacy breech and whether individuals, HHS or the media must be contacted (Benefeds Training, 2010). The officer has to figure out three things: Was it innocent access? Was it innocent internal disclosure? Is retention of the information is possible?

We must be ethical with how we handle someone’s personal information but if someone is not honest they may steal information from that person about their medical records, where they live, banking information, anything you can think of we have access to and an example of unethical communication would be using a person’s personal information for their own means. We are trained in security safety and many of my co-workers have worked at another call center and we had a contract with the government to do customer service for passport information. So most of us are used to having a high level of security and people would get spoken to if we did not follow the strict rules and usually the first time is just a warning.

Because the information that I learned was from a training session I just realized that I cannot cite the source I used to locate the information I shared because I would be breaking the rules of my contract. Some of you may work for a federal agency or have heard of Benefeds before and I wish you luck if you need to change your rate plans during open season.