I have done a search and not come up with much of an answer. I work
for an agency that provides therapy services to children with special
needs. Part of the regulations stipulate a signature to be placed
after a therapist generates notes based on a mandated service each
time that service is completed. To further complicate things, if that
therapist is a COTA(Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant), then
that same note must be signed by an OTR(Registered Occupational
Therapist). Needless to say, the paper method being used now is
generating the need for Physical Therapy on our therapists' wrists...

What I would like to do is allow the therapists to enter their daily
notes onto a form, and allow each note to be digitally signed upon
submission. Further, I would like to have their supervisors sign off
on the same records once completed. I do not want to use a signature
pad each and every time a note is generated -- this would defeat the
purpose. Is there any way to accomplish this in Access in accordance
with HIPAA and FERPA regulations?

Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

On Aug 17, 9:16*pm, Tim Dunne <timmydu... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Not so much a technical solution as a procedural one - some regulators
don't consider Access to the be HIPAA compliant (FTR I don't see a
problem - it's more secure than most file rooms).

It comes down to what your management and governing body will accept.
Some are perfectly fine with the user login name being appended to the
record, others will only accept paper. At one crisis center I worked
for we did a single end-of-shift report for all transactions (phone
calls, interventions, etc) for a specific staff person who would then
sign the last page, asserting that the report was accurate. If
someone wanted to see a signature for a given client the could find
the printed report pretty quickly.

Here are some references:

Digital Signature
http://digitalid.verisign.com/client...oSignature.htm
Verisign, one of the leaders in digital certificates, explains digital
signatures.

Digital Signature definition
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com...211953,00.html
A digital signature (not to be confused with a digital certificate) is
an electronic rather than a written signature that can be used by
someone to authenticate the identity of the sender of a message or of
the signer of a document. It can also be used to ensure that the
original content of the message or document that has been conveyed is
unchanged. Additional benefits to the use of a digital signature are
that it is easily transportable, cannot be easily repudiated, cannot
be imitated by someone else, and can be automatically time-stamped.

Digital signatures - the legal perspective
http://www.abanet.org/scitech/ec/isc/dsg-tutorial.html
The American Bar Association Section of Science and Technology
Information Security Committee explains digital signatures

Good luck,

Tim Mills-Groninger