Privacy has been a right for a very long time when dealing with medical records, the laws is made by each state government. Plus the honorable tradition of doctor-patient privilege has been a method of protecting a patient’s privacy. It has become an issue.
In 2003 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal bill that was passed set guidelines for keeping health records private nationally. The biggest problem with this is that it only applies to electronic health records. The other problem is that it only concerns medical records kept by health plans, doctors, and other health care providers, and health clearinghouses. The health care providers means: dental, medical, and mental doctors, pharmacists, laboratories, hospitals and other staff. But the information has to be organized and sent electronically for the HIPAA to apply to them.
The conundrum is that a person’s health information is in existence somewhere besides his doctor’s office or the hospital, health plans and the like. The places that have files containing your medical information that aren’t guarded by HIPAA are financial companies, educational institutions, and job related offices. These are all candidates for situations in which your health records could be in jeopardy.
Many people haven’t heard of the Medical Information Bureau. It isn’t subject to the HIPAA guidelines. It is a primary database used by insurance companies. It houses medical information. Around fifteen million United States citizens and Canadians are filed in this database. Codes are used in these files that stand for particular health issues/problems. Since MIB is a consumer reporting agency it is covered under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It gives the consumer the right to get a copy of his report and to make the MIB fix any spurious information.
The insurance companies also have two places to look for a person’s medical drug history: MedPoint and Intelliscript. They keep databases of this information. The records can transverse a five-year period. Insurance companies sometimes use some of this data to reject a request for insurance coverage completely, for particular health condition or the premiums for that person could go up.
It wasn’t until 2007 that most people knew about MedPoint and Intelliscript. That was when the Federal Trade Commission sued the owners of these two companies. The commission stated that the Fair Credit Reporting Act applied to them. Any person that has made an application for individual health, life or disability insurance can ask for and receive a copy of the report.
Electronic health records compiled by a person’s doctor, dentist or hospital could be very useful and a good way for the record to be sent to another doctor. But other electronic records of a health nature are kept by people that it is questionable should have them. The consumer does have some protection concerning these electronic health records maintained by people catering to the insurance companies, but should these keepers of the medical database exist and why should they have our records anyway?
For more information go to: http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs8-med.htm. It is part of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse website.
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