Policy on fax, e-mail protects privacy

New feature of Skolar provides information on antibiotic effectiveness

SHC's policy on appropriate use of restraints: what physicians need to know

Whom can you talk to? Policy provides guidance to communcation

Giants event begun by Stanford physician raises fund for organ donation

Stanford Medical Group Physician led successful push for open access

Medical staff-funded awards go to 11 nurses at Nurse Week ceremony

Locating ED is all in a drill's work

WED. JULY 9

Semiannual medical staff meeting in Fairchild Auditorium. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres, 5 to 6:15 p.m. Business meeting, 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. The guest speaker will be Carol Glaser, a physician and veterinarian who is an acting chief in the Division of Communicable Disease Control in the state of California's Department of Health Services. Glaser will discuss the topic, "West Nile Virus is Coming to California: What Physicians Need to Know."

Policy on fax, e-mail protects privacy

The recent implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the heightened concern about safeguarding patient information have prompted Stanford and other health-care organizations to examine how faxes and e-mails are used. Based on such an evaluation, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital have established policies to ensure that the use of faxes and e-mail does not violate the confidentiality of patients' protected health information.

Andrew Newman, chair of SHC's Health Information Management Systems committee, noted that the hospital's goal is to achieve a workable balance between protecting patients' health information and allowing health-care organizations and patients to continue using technologies that facilitate the exchange of information.

"It's important that we maintain the privacy of patients' information without making the use of these technologies so cumbersome that people won't want to use them," Newman said. He noted that "e-mail is clearly going to play a much larger role in physicians' practice in the future, as patients increasingly want that access."

New feature of Skolar provides information on antibiotic effectiveness

With a few quick keystrokes and mouse clicks on a computer or PDA, medical staff members can now find out which antibiotics are most effective against the strains of bacteria found at Stanford Hospital & Clinics. The information was recently added as a Stanford-specific feature to Skolar, the medical search engine developed at Stanford that gives clinicians easy access to information from a broad range of authoritative sources.

Parking goes underground

The new underground parking garage on Pasteur Drive, which opened in early May, is temporarily being used for patient and visitor parking Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m., while the Blake Wilbur Drive garage undergoes renovations. Beginning in late June, patient and visitor parking will move back to the Blake Wilbur garage and the Pasteur Drive garage will then be used exclusively for physicians and staff. For questions about parking, call Jan Walker at (650) 725-5924.