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Health Privacy: Health Privacy Laws Aren't Putting the Patient First
James Pyles, co-founder and principal of the law firm of Powers, Pyles, Sutter, & Verville, criticized the handlng of health information privacy in the US at a Health Privacy Summit in Washington DC. It was reported by Dan Bowman of FierceHealthIT and Diana Manos of Healthcare IT News.
At the summit, Pyles criticized existing legislation like HIPAA, saying that it did not meet the standards for a best practice for privacy protection. He said that HIPAA was originally intended as a means for physicians to get reimbursement and wasn’t written with patient privacy in mind.
Pyles said that “We now have electronic disclosures of patient privacy that are entirely different from disclosures of paper records. You can get a paper record back; you cannot get an electronic record back. You can disclose millions of electronic records simultaneously; you cannot do that with paper records.” The electronic management of health care data is a ‘game changer’ according to Pyles. “The damage that can be done to someone is perpetual. And the damages that can be awarded are incalculable.”
“One would think, if you were approaching healthcare privacy policy, the very first thing, the very top priority would be to ask what do the patients want? Unfortunately, we have laws on the books that do not put the patient first.”
