Comments on: HIPAA

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:15:24 +0000

HIPAA is a disaster for medicine. I liked the honor system much better, and I thinked it worked just as well. What patients don't know is that if they have an uncommon disorder, that HIPAA hurts their care. Medicine is a team effort in such cases and requires everyone involved and even outside clinicians and medical students at teaching hospitals. Putting the horse-blinders on a medical professional is ridculous. It hurts patient care, it hurts medical education, it hurts harmless minimal risk research and surveys, and it hurts quality control. Damn Shalala and her sister. Medicine grew naturally out of curiosity about the human body and condition…consider Vesalius. Robbing medical students of that experience is a travesty. I knew a patient from Italy who advertized his name and entire history on the web, and he got the best medicine from a top university because he did. Americans are way too paranoid… and for what?. I believe patient's privacy to there individual caretaker if the patient wishes it, but there should be strong disclaimers that the more privacy, that there are risks too for our entire medical system and also the individual patient. Note some doctors might like this policy if they give bad care! We need carefully orchestrated transparency, but not this mess.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:27:56 +0000

Brenda,
You bet others are in the same situation! I tried today to talk to my daughter's psychiatrist – not to GET information but to give her some information – and was told "I'm sorry. You're not on the HIPPA list". That's right. When my daughter becomes manic and delusional, she takes me off the list, along with anyone else who doesn't agree that "She's fine." How can you ask a mentally ill patient how they are doing, when, in their opinion, everyone else has the problems – not her. However, she is sleeping with friends, or in her car or the hospital waiting room, because she won't go home to her husband. She talks (yells) incessantly, spends money like it is going out of style, and blames everyone else for not being educated about how to handle her. How can she ever get help, if she won't let her family talk to her doctors?
I'm sorry this is so incoherent, but this has been going on and getting worse and worse for the past 6 weeks. But, as usual, a law with good intentions has some really bad results. I, too, hate HIPPA.

By: brenda

brenda — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 05:38:31 +0000

I hate HIPPA because it has made obtaining medical care for my mentally ill son a nightmare.Hes 21 leagaly and 5 years old mentally.I am really upset that he lowest class of society will now suffer even more under the guise of a law to protect their employment,insurability and the like.He will never be able to work anywhere and at best he will recieve state medicaid for health care.Any one else in this situation?

By: Daren Franzman

Daren Franzman — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 20:00:40 +0000

As a parent who has had a concern severe enough to contact my public county officials, it has been more than disturbing to be told that under NO circumstances are the public servants allowed to advocate with a hospital due to HIPAA. In fact I was told their calling the hospital may well get them sued, so their attorneys have advised them not to. I was advised to contact the media (it was immediately taken care of that way)
This is a 4yr old child with facial damage from an accident and who needed surgery. The surgeon had secluded the surgery 5 times and canceled it due to operating room overbooking.
Due To HIPAA we were forced to have media attention shined on us, giving up all privacy of all kinds! It could have been taken care of quietly and privately by having the straight jacket of HIPAA striped away.

By: Melvin H.

Melvin H. — Mon, 02 May 2005 13:47:20 +0000

Well, the ONE thing that DOES exist under HIPAA is the pain in my wrist, caused by the staggering number of different forms to deal with who gets the information and who gets contacted.

Simply put–Why was there not ONE STANDARD FORM to list the person(s), doctor(s), and for billing–instead of each doctor/practice/etc. having their own?

I have to help out with my mom’s paperwork at each doctor’s office and hospital visit (ER and otherwise), and each place has its own form for HIPAA permission to see the data and results–AND it has to be done every year!!

What should happen is that there should be ONE standard form for HIPAA, and it should have the following:
1–Who is your primary doctor (where applicable)
2–Who can the doctor share info with (family members, billing for insurance, primary and other doctors)
3–Where and how can I be contacted (home or work, by phone/e-mail/answering machine/etc.)
4–Messages to call the doctor back, or remind patients of appointments, should be exempt from HIPAA requirements of privacy–in other words, reminders of appointment times, or doctors needing to leave a “call-me” message, should not automatically be considered priviledged information [i.e. test results] under HIPAA if patient gives the OK
5–The permission given should be good for FIVE or more years instead of one; the patient can be asked if there are any changes or can make needed changes themselves when they visit each doctor
(this can be revoked by the patient at any time).

By: Overlawyered

Overlawyered — Mon, 02 May 2005 04:10:28 +0000

Why dislike HIPAA?

Why get annoyed at the federal medical privacy law (discussed in this space Mar. 16, Feb. 5, 2004, etc.)?*Because it means your patients at the VA hospital often have no names on their doors? (MedRants,…

By: rjh

rjh — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 15:48:45 +0000

There is more to the privacy rule component. At the time there were also some new real cases:

1) An activist stole and publicized details regarding names and addresses of AIDS patients in an effort to embarass and ostracize them.

2) A hospital sold medical records to a drug company so that drug advertizing could be better targeted.

3) A hospital sold medical records to potential employers who wanted to investigate job candidates.

All of these cases were obviously unethical behavior. It came as a surprise to prosecutors, lawyers and legislators that they were also entirely legal. The tradition of medical privacy was embedded in the law with a doctor’s priveledge, but there was no legal protection against willing disclosure. All three cases were entirely legal and the patients were completely unprotected by the law.

So the charter was given to HIPAA to embody the current ethical practices into a legally enforceable form.

As usual, regulation is inefficient, implementations are poor, empire building and myths are rampant, etc. That there is no real change is actually intentional. The goal was not to change the norms of ethical behavior. It was to give a legal basis for enforcing the existing ethical behavior.

A strong part of this motivations was that the transition from paper to electronic records would also immensely increase the potential access to patient records by more people. In the paper records world it was difficult to exploit the records for unethical purposes, and the records were available primarily to people with strong ethical training. In the electronic world it is easy to exploit the records and many people who have access are from professions that lack strong ethical training.

By: John Fembup

John Fembup — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 03:41:01 +0000

The driving force behind the privacy rules was the intent of the federal government to simplify the task of coding, collecting, reporting and analyzing health claim data for the federal programe – Medicare and Medicaid, mostly. The idea is to establish uniform code sets and uniform formats that would streamline the gathering and analysis of the data. As thinking for that project began, realization dawned that all that electronic data would create massive opportunities for mischief. Answer? Privacy rules, of course. hat also explains why the privacy rules were launched before the simplification initiative got very far.

By: Matt S.

Matt S. — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 19:03:46 +0000

Hey, this HIPAA gripe is actually targeted toward you, somewhat directly. (Not that it is your fault, but it’s possible -though unlikely- you could cut some of this red tape).

We got an e-mail a few months ago that we had to complete an online training and test by 03/31/05. I know that federal regulations say that the institution has to comply with this testing for all it’s employees by 04/20. So I did the test earlier this month, 3 weeks before the deadline I was given. I thought all was cool.

Then, I get a letter from the Huntsville campus saying that it is not enough that I took the test and my score is recorded online, I need to print out my score and turn it into the office. Well, I’m in Birmingham this month, so I figured that I just needed to turn it into student affairs down here.

Nobody here knew what I was talking about. Birmingham students don’t have to print it out. Then I realized that maybe the paper copies were for Huntsville Hospital. (I’ll ignore the fact that I graduate in a month, I finished my last clinical rotation on Sunday, and I finished my last Huntsville rotaton in December. I want to comply.)

Well, I dropped a paper copy in the mail yesterday. It probably won’t get there by the deadline of 5pm tomorrow. So I figured I’d make some PDFs of the score and e-mail them to Huntsville, so they can print them out up there.

Resources spent by me to get this paper copy of my computer test to a Clinic/Hospital where I no longer work: approximately 3 hours and 37 cents. Amount of additional privacy afforded to patients: zero.

By: James Gaulte

James Gaulte — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:43:05 +0000

My understanding is that the driving force behind the lobbying for HIPAA was the insurance industry who realized they would save a bundle by making everyone use the same diagnostic and administrative codes. The security and privacy sections were added as a veneer because of the issue of patient confidentiality in transmitting electronic data here and there.But it is the doctors and hospitals that pay for the implementation of those aspects of the law,not the insurance companies-they are the benefeciaries.(So are the consultant firms that sell docs and hospitals systems for compliance.)I think the follow-the-money rule works again.