Patient privacy issues are very well-understood at Duke University Health System. For the last eight years--before the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's introduction in 1996--fall has been the season for Duke's "Mums the Word" campaign, aimed at reminding employees about the importance of patient privacy. During the annual campaign, Duke decorates its hospitals with chrysanthemum plants and posters as visual reminders of the importance of respecting patients' privacy. This year, HIPAA privacy training has become part of the Mums the Word program.

Indeed, all hospitals have to beef up their processes for training employees and tracking that training. HIPAA guidelines state that health-care companies must provide privacy education to all workers. "That's a big nut to crack," says John Halamka, CIO at CareGroup Healthcare System. All workers--from doctors and nurses to janitors, food-handlers, and even volunteers--have to undergo training.

Duke has started HIPAA training over the Internet, Seelinger says.

It's a big task at Duke University Health System, which includes three hospitals, home health-care operations, a hospice, and physicians' practices. In October, it began rolling out HIPAA training over the Internet to its 25,000 workers in the form of an HTML slide show that includes audio and quizzes, says Terry Seelinger, E-learning manager of corporate IS services at Duke.

"The quiz gives real-world examples of situations and asks how you'd handle them," Seelinger says. Questions might ask about the correct way a health-care worker should respond to a neighbor who shows up in a hospital waiting room, he says. The quiz will help Duke refine its courses. If Duke observes that a lot of people are incorrectly answering certain questions, that could indicate a need to clarify corresponding information in the course.

Workers log on to the privacy course with an ID unique to this system. Supervisors, as well as the company's compliance office, can run reports to see who has completed the training.

The HIPAA privacy course is being offered via Duke's E-learning platform, Lotus LearningSpace, which Duke also uses to provide other online employee training. In addition to the more "generic" HIPAA privacy training presented in the slide show, departments within Duke, such as the physicians' group, can use LearningSpace to create privacy-related content more specific to their workers.

To help companies quickly implement a turnkey HIPAA training system, Lotus has teamed with Health Care Compliance Strategies Inc., which provides content for multimedia privacy courses for LearningSpace.