Privacy Laws and Health Care Directives
No doubt you have received numerous mailings in recent months from insurance companies, credit card companies, bank and other businesses setting forth their various privacy policies and your rights with regard to your financial or medical information. Recent legislation known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) (effective April 2003) dealt primarily with allowing employees to continue to maintain health insurance when they changed jobs but it also dealt with the issue of what health-care information can be passed on to others.
It took Congress nearly four years to come up with regulations which would govern the privacy of health care information. Congress provided health-care providers must make “reasonable efforts to limit protected health care information to the minimum necessary to accomplish the intended purpose of the use, disclosure or request”. Along with this requirement were very stiff penalties for the wrongful sale, use or transfer of health-care information.
Because of the penalty provisions in HIPAA doctors, medical staffs and hospitals are now reluctant to release health-care information without express written authorization to do so. In order to avoid liability for unauthorized release of information medical practitioners and hospitals are looking for specific written authorization from the patient to release his or her medical information. While for many years clients have executed Health Care Directives (or Health Care Proxies) which provide for their designated agents to have access to this information it is now considered better practice to have patients or clients specifically authorize the release of information as governed by HIPAA to their representatives. The new release of information provisions should apply not just to doctors or hospitals but also to dentists, health insurance companies, laboratories, pharmacists, clinics and any medical information clearing house.
We highly recommend that our clients revise their Health Care Proxy (Health Care Directive) to comply with the new regulations. We believe we have a simple process to assist you in this endeavor.
