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Title	The Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media
Sponsor	JHM Marketing and Communications
URL	http://www.insidehopkinsmedicine.org/insidehopkins/pdfs...
Details	Posting a photo of your favorite patient on Facebook may seem like a harmless way to show how much you love your job. What you may not realize is that under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), sharing information about patients on Facebook or any other social media site can result in professional sanctions and significant financial penalties that could be imposed on Johns Hopkins or on you. The Johns Hopkins Privacy Office (HIPAA Office) wants you to stop and think about what you’re sharing before you click “post” on your favorite social media site. Here are seven ways to reduce your risk of committing a violation. 1. Avoid any discussion of specific patients, patient information and specific patient events on Facebook, Twitter, PatientsLikeMe or other social networking sites. 2. Do not assume that not mentioning a patient’s name or other identifiers—for example, saying “a middle aged male with heart disease”—sufficiently de-identifies the patient to others. 3. Do not post images of patients; their conditions, wounds, or the like; patients’ families; or patient care areas on a social networking site. Use of cellphone cameras in patient care areas by workforce members is against Johns Hopkins policies. 4. Be careful of “friending” patients on social media and having any public exchange with them that may relate to their medical care or their visit to Johns Hopkins. Even disclosing that an individual is or was a patient is an inappropriate disclosure of protected health information (PHI). 5. Use privacy settings to safeguard content to the fullest extent possible and limit the number of users who may access your information. Check your privacy policies routinely. It is common for social media sites to frequently change their policies without your knowledge. 6. Be careful when downloading applications from social media sites. Many applications include malicious code. As a general rule, you should only download applications that you have knowledge of and are searching for, not ones that pop up on a site. 7. Remember, you are responsible for the content of your own posts, including any legal liability incurred, e.g., HIPAA. As soon as something has been posted on a social media site, it is no longer private and can no longer be protected. See the Johns Hopkins Social Media Guidelines at hopkinsmedicine.org/webcenter and the Johns Hopkins HIPAA Social Media Policy here.

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