Patient Identification & Consent

Identity comes before action

Every request that touches a chart starts with the right patient. Two patients with the same common name, a father and son who share a name, a mother calling for three children: the front desk sorts these out daily, and mistakes spread into the chart.

Katie asks for the patient's full name and date of birth and uses them to look the patient up in eClinicalWorks before booking or recording a request. Your rules decide what happens when the details do not match a record cleanly, and the summary shows exactly what the caller gave.

Calling on someone else's behalf

Parents, adult children, spouses and caregivers call for patients all the time. Katie records who is calling, their relationship to the patient and what they want. The summary shows both people, so staff can see at a glance that a daughter, not the patient, made the request.

Recording the relationship is not the same as approving it. Staff still check whether that person is listed as someone the patient has authorized before sharing anything beyond logistics.

• Caller's name and callback number
• Relationship to the patient
• The patient's name and date of birth
• What the caller is asking for

What Katie will not disclose

Katie does not read out test results, diagnoses or chart contents to anyone, patient or not. Whether a caregiver may receive clinical information is a consent question your staff answer using your eClinicalWorks records and your policies.

That keeps the AI out of the hardest disclosure decisions, which belong with people who can see the authorizations on file and know the family.

Recording consent statements

When a patient says on the phone that their spouse may call on their behalf, Katie captures it in the summary. It is a statement for staff to act on, not a completed authorization. Your process decides whether a signed form is needed before it is honored.

The same applies to requests to send records elsewhere. Katie records where the patient wants records sent; your release of information process does the rest.

Why consistency matters

Human verification varies with how busy the desk is. On a quiet morning, staff ask every question; at the lunch rush, they skip some. Asking the same identifying questions on every call, in the same order, makes the process predictable for patients and auditable for your compliance lead.

Patients notice, too. A caller who is asked the same two questions every time learns that the practice takes their privacy seriously, and stops being surprised by it.