If a Patient is age 90 or over:

In order to remain compliant with HIPAA privacy standards, health information for a patient over the age of 89 cannot be transmitted even though it meets the other de-identification standards.

This means that the data needed to perform Risk Assessments cannot be trasmitted for patients over the age of 89. This is intended to protect the privacy of an individual due to the increasingly small number of individuals still alive at the upper age range. In other words, as you look at a group of individuals of different age groups, due to the smaller number of older people alive compared to middle-aged people, it might be possible to identify a patient simply by knowing the age, if there were few or no other individuals of that age in the group.

Impact of age on the use of the PreViser RiskCalculator™:

The RiskCalculator™ is still accurate for patients over age 89. You can enter all the data, but upon clicking Finish at the end, you will not be able to transmit the data. Instead, a message will inform you that the patient age must be between 1 and 89 years.

At that point, you have two options, both of which set the system to calculate the patient's age as being under age 90 and therefore you will be permitted to transmit the data. In other words, change the patient's age to 89, to force the information to transmit. The patient's age is determined by the number of years between the date of birth and the exam date. The first option is to return to the Exam Date field and change the year to a slightly earlier year, so that the system calculates the patient's age as falling within those parameters. The second option is to go to the Patient Details page and change the year of birth to a later date so the system would calculate the patient's age to be valid for transmission.

Note that changing the patient's age slightly at that age level (e.g. to 89 instead of 90) will not affect the risk score as calculated by this software.