Question

Consider your local pharmacy. What physical, technical, organizational and administrative safeguards have you observed at this pharmacy?

Answer 1

Ans) When considering HIPAA compliance, I expect patient heath information and patient data to be protected at all costs. For example, right when I walked in the store, I noticed security cameras everywhere. The cameras are a good idea to
assure all traffic to the medication area is tracked. I also noticed to get into where the medications were being stored there was a metal key punch code. This is to keep
unauthorized personnel and customers out of the medication area, as well as to protect patient information located in computers and on prescription labels.

- One thing that I thought was a great idea is how the prepared prescriptions were being stored. They were in bins facing the front counter, but had a white plastic shield in the front of the bin to cover up the patient information on the prescription. This way, the medications were easily assessable by staff, but the patient information could not be seen from the front
counter.
- I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but I could not hear anything the two people behind the counter were talking about. Not being able to hear the staff preparing the
medications helps to further protect patient information from listening ears. One final thing that I thought was good was that I could easily tell the difference between non-pharmacy staff, and the regular store staff. This is good because I would not want to walk up to regular store personnel and begin talking about by health problems, and asking for certain medications (I am also sure the normal staff does not want to hear it anyways).

- Overall, the CVS seems to take HIPAA compliance very seriously, as they have multiple layers of security in place.
As far as what could be better, I did not see many improvements. I did notice that the prescription bags themselves had information on the front; perhaps this could be covered with some type of paper flap.