Confusion about the privacy rules mandated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountabilty Act (HIPAA) is rampant among physicians, other healthcare providers, hospital executives, state agencies–you name it. This story revealed that HIPAA patient privacy restrictions are far more elastic than most people realize. However, paranoid hospital lawyers and risk managers, seeking to protect their organizations against lawsuits, over interpreted the law, and as a result have made rules on patient privacy far more rigid–even to the point of interfering with a patient’s care–than the law’s drafters ever intended. These rules have now been broadly misinterpreted by doctors and healthcare organizations and are contributing to the dysfunction of our healthcare system.
