Patient confidentiality is hanging in the balance as legislators and policy makers haggle with federal standards protecting medical records.
While fine-tuning on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) - which calls for a secure, standardized transmission and storage system for personal medical records - drags on two healthcare organizations recently flexed their policy muscle on how patient confidentiality regulation should be shaped. Here's the latest on what the American Hospital Association (AHA) and Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) are recommending.
AHA representatives pushed for consistency in protecting patient medical outlining these discrepancies with Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala's recent recommendations on patient confidentiality:
Law enforcement agencies have unrestricted access to patient information.
Patient confidentiality laws vary from state to state, adding to the jigsaw confusion over healthcare information crossing state boundaries.
Patients have to determine how much medical information they should provide their caregivers which impedes the "free flow" of information necessary for effective healthcare delivery.
The AHA's recommendations:
Push through uniform patient confidentiality legislation so that all states are reading from the same page.
Federal laws must be broad enough to recognize the changing nature of today's healthcare delivery and protect providers that generate, store, transmit or use individually identifiable health information as well as genetic information.
Patients must have access to their own medical information.
The HIAA's patient confidentiality recommndations mirror the AHA's and are based on four principles:
Uniform federal standards.
Equal treatment of all personally identifiable patient information and protected from inappropriate disclosure.
Appropriate use of patient information.
Strong federal preemption of state laws that challenge uniformity. (AHA, Dionne Dougall, 202/626-2284; HIAA, Richard Coorsh, 202/824-1787)
