A Conversation With ... Karla Myers, RN

Title: Assistant Administrator

Education: Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Avila College in Kansas City; certified professional in health care quality

Areas of focus: As one of five administrators at OCH, Myers is in charge of quality, accreditation and safety. She’s also OCH’s privacy officer.

Tell us about Ozarks Community Hospital.

We’re licensed for 45 beds, but we staff a 10-bed geriatric psych unit called Resolutions, and we staff 21 medical-surgical beds. The majority of our patient demographic are Medicaid patients … so that’s the children and young adult population. Then the swing side of that is that we also have a high Medicare patient population. A number of our physicians are also medical directors in nursing homes, so a lot of our patients are nursing home patients. We don’t deliver babies, and we don’t have an intensive care unit. We have a charitable mission as a not-for-profit, and we do see self-pay patients.

As privacy officer, you are responsible for maintaining HIPAA compliance. What have been the biggest misconceptions about privacy and HIPAA?

A big piece of that law is about … people being able to take their insurance with them from place of employment to place of employment. … There’s a lot crammed into that law, but all we hear about is the privacy stuff. (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) states that we can use and disclose personal health information for the treatment of the patient, dealing with payment for the services rendered by the hospital, and also for health care operations like quality audits, any kind of training that we do. When HIPAA came into place, it was really easy for people to lose focus of those three points, and health care got kind of crazy. … (But) it’s OK to use sign-in sheets for patients. You can’t say, “Mrs. Smith is here for her gallbladder checkup,” (on the sheets) but you can have sheets that have Mrs. Smith’s name on it. Another big thing was reminding people about their appointments. For years, we had always called people … and all the sudden people got worried about whether we can still make those kinds of phone calls. Well, yes, those phone calls can still be made, but … you have to be careful (about) the amount of information that you disclose.

What has HIPAA meant for patients’ access to their own information?

This law gives them access to their own health information. No doctor’s office or no hospital can say, “I’m not going to let you see your chart,” though there are some exclusions to that written into the law. We don’t release psychotherapy notes to patients. The law says patients can come in and read their charts, they can request copies of their charts … and amendments to their charts. It also says that while they can ask … the hospital doesn’t have to allow you to amend your chart every time, but you are allowed to at least ask if you can. A physician may inadvertently write something in a chart that would lead the insurance company to believe that a patient has a pre-existing condition … patients could write an addendum and explain that it’s not something they’ve been treated for or told they have. We’ve actually never done (an amendment) here, but we could.

What’s your background in health care?

I was the head nurse at the outpatient surgery department at what used to be Springfield Community Hospital, now Cox Walnut Lawn. That was for about 10 years. I’ve been in the quality arena for about 13 years … and with OCH for eight years.

OCH was Doctors Hospital until January. How is the name-change process going?

Slow. I think patients probably don’t realize it too much, because we haven’t changed the signage yet. To them, nothing has changed all that much. When we switched to Ozarks Community Hospital, we acquired the name Doctors Hospital so we could continue to legally operate under that name until money allows for all the signage changes.

What’s on the horizon for OCH?

We’ll continue to watch closely what happens with MO HealthNet, because how that’s funded will affect this hospital. We will continue to try to expand our services to our Medicaid and Medicare patients. We’re looking at increasing our specialists, especially our surgical specialist. We’ve added a neurologist and a pulmonologist to our medical staff. We have a new sleep lab. … We also will probably continue to grow our base of rural health clinics (in Rogersville and Mount Vernon.) ... That would be a long-term plan.

Tell us about your family and your interests outside work.

My husband, Dr. William Myers, is a neurophysiologist at OCH. I have two sons. Evan is 14 and Spencer is 12, and they both go to Nixa schools. I’m very involved in my church, Nixa Christian Church.

Interview by Features Editor Maria Hoover. You can e-mail her with suggestions for future installments of this feature at mhoover@sbj.net.[[In-content Ad]]