It Can Happen To You
It can happen to you, and I don’t mean the lottery. HIPAA has been with us for a little more than 10 years now and the conflicts between patient privacy, a family member’s right to know, and a health care professional’s desire to stay out of trouble continue. The New York Times recently ran an article highlighting some of the unfortunate roadblocks everyday people have run into with health care professionals when trying to get informed of a relatives medical condition.
- Nancy Banks called her mother’s hospital room in Tampa Bay, FL and heard screaming, yelling, and crying. When Nancy tried to find out what was going on from hospital representatives, they refused to discuss it with her because they believed they were prevented from doing do by HIPAA. She drove over twenty hours to the hospital to get some answers and was told the same thing. The best she was offered was being able to speak with the doctor in the morning. Unfortunately, the next morning she learned her mother had heart failure and her kidneys were shutting down after many hours of having no idea what was going on.
- An emergency room nurse in Palos Heights, IL threatened Gerard Nussbaum with arrest for scanning his father-in-law’s medical chart following admission for a stroke. Luckily Gerard is a HIPAA consultant and did not back down. Mr. Nussbaum discovered the nurse was about to administer a dangerous round of sedatives to his father-in-law by reviewing his chart. Who knows what could have happened if he followed the nurse’s orders and did not act to protect his father-in-law?
- Nurses in an emergency room at St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown, Ohio, refused to telephone parents of ailing students themselves, insisting a friend do it, for fear of passing out confidential information.
The article does a good job in pointing out that many of these roadblocks people run into are not intentional roadblocks. They are health care professionals taking a very conservative and cautious approach in interpreting an at times vague regulation to avoid getting into trouble. So, even though there is no legal obstacle in a family member’s right to be involved in many cases, everyone runs the risk of encountering an overzealous nurse and there is no way to avoid that risk.
What can you do to protect yourself? Prepare a HIPAA authorization release and give it to your family members that are likely to be involved with your treatment at a hospital. It may not be legally necessary, but in many cases this is the best way to placate the overzealous nurse that they will not get into trouble by speaking with you.
You can read the full New York Times article here.
You can find another story of one mother’s encounter with HIPAA when trying to help her son here.
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