In small town news worthy of national laughter, the City of Albany, New York treasurer refused to release copies of forgiven parking tickets to an investigating committee citing HIPAA privacy rules. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, for those with momentary lapse of memory, provided protections against unauthorized and unnecessary disclosure of medical records. Fire/EMS services made numerous business modifications to comply with HIPAA. Some 13 years after implementation, HIPAA remains poorly understood and is often incorrectly cited by folks unwilling or uninterested in sharing information.

I've heard nurses not want to update family members about a loved one's condition, hospitals refuse to provide patient information to an EMS crew who had treated and transported the patient, firefighters refuse to tell a family member or friend where a patient had been transported - all wrongly in the name of HIPAA.

HIPAA was designed to prevent medical information from falling into the wrong hands. Parking tickets are not medical information. Anyone a patient wants to know about their medical condition is entitled to have that information. Any health care provider who treats a patient is entitled to medical information about that patient. EMS services are required to post HIPAA information on their web sites and provide education on HIPAA to their members and employees. This parking ticket fiasco serves as an outright silly example of how convoluted HIPAA misinterpretations have become. It's probably time to check the HIPAA knowledge in your department.

Mike McEvoy
EMS Editor
Fire Engineering

Labels: EMS, HIPAA, medical, Mike McEvoy

posted by Mike McEvoy
4/23/2009 11:32:00 AM

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