Restricting Access to Patient Records Using Patient Sets

Is one of your staff members also a patient at your clinic? Or maybe one of their family members is? Do you have patients whose records you want to prevent other users from accessing? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have come to the right place!

Our new roles system includes a tool designed specifically to prevent access to specific charts within your clinic. It is perfect in situations where you need to block specific staff members from accessing a small number of charts.

When configuring your access rules, you will first create a set of patients. Once a set is saved, it can then be used to limit access to records contained within the set. 

Note: Sets are not dynamic; they are a snapshot of patients matching your criteria at the time the set is created. As such, this feature is not designed to prevent doctors from seeing each other’s patient records: newly registered patients will not automatically be added to the set, and the set will not update if patient records are modified to match the set's creation criteria. It is important to note that updating the Patient Set must be done manually by a system administrator on a regular basis for this tool to work in this way.

Creating a Patient Set

To create a Patient Set, use the Demographic Report Tool. If you are not familiar with this report, do not hesitate to consult our guide on Using the Demographic Report Tool which will walk you through accessing and running a Demographic Report.

When running a report with the purpose of creating a patient set, select ‘Demographic #’ under the ‘Search For’ section, then the desired filtering criteria under the ‘Where’ section. If you are looking at adding only a few specific demographics to the set, add their demographic IDs in the ‘Demographic ID(s)’ field. Click on the ‘Run Query’ button towards the bottom left of the page when ready. Review your results and, if necessary, update your report criteria until you are satisfied with the results. 

Once you are happy with the results, find the ‘Set Name’ field located at the top of the result list.

Enter the name of the set you want to create in the ‘Set Name’ field, then click on the ‘Save Patient Set’ button. Please note set names must be unique, and will be used to prevent access to records in the next step, so ensure your set names are clear to you.

Configuring Patient Set Access

Patient Set Access can only be configured in the Juno interface administration panel. If you are using the Classic interface, navigate to Juno by clicking on the Juno EMR logo at the top left of your screen. Once in the Juno interface, go through the steps below:

1. Click on ‘Admin’ at the top of your screen to open the administration panel. 

   1. If you are using a smaller screen, the ‘Admin’ menu will be located within the ‘More’ drop down menu. Click on ‘More’, then click on ‘Admin’ to open the administration panel.

2. On the left, click on the ‘User Management’ tab to expand it.

3. Click on the ‘Manage Roles’ option to open the Roles Manager.

4. Click on the ‘Manage Set Access’ button located at the bottom left of the roles manager window. This will open the ‘Manage Demographic Set Security’ overlay show below.

5. In the ‘Manage Demographic Set Security’ overlay,

   1. Using the drop down at the top of the overlay, select the provider whose access you want to manage.

   2. You will find the patient set(s) that are blocked for this user under the ‘Black Listed’ section on the left (b) and the existing patient set(s) under the ‘Demographic Sets’ section on the right (c). Select the set from one column and click on the appropriate arrow button (d) to move the sets as needed.

   3. Click on the ‘Done’ button (e) at the bottom right of the overlay to save the changes.

Accessing a Blocked Record

In the Juno interface, users will see a message when they attempt to access a record they are not permitted to view:
 

Classic interface users will be able to access the patient’s Master File with the demographic details, but will get an permission error message when attempting to access the patient’s eChart.