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Wednesday, September 17, 2003Some hospitals may be overly cautious or perhaps misinterpreting HIPAA, said Katharina Kopp, program manager of the Health Privacy Project, a Washington advocacy group that helped develop the regulations. Bill Pierce, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the HIPAA rules govern only health-care information. Hospitals are free to compile lists of religious affiliations and provide them to clergy, but some area hospital officials say they now ask patients if they want to be included on those listings, too. When the penalty for breaking the rule is prison, who could blame them? And the most amazing thing about the privacy rules is that plenty of third parties still have access to the information: But critics say the government's standards aren't the problem. Rather, they say the problem is medical records are now much too easy to access by a multitude of third parties. Indeed, says the group, Health and Human Services' "own findings show that the rules affect the medical privacy rights of 'virtually every American,' and allows more than '600,000 entities' access to their records …" That list includes insurance companies, banks, employers, and law enforcement agencies. posted by Sydney on 9/17/2003 08:07:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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