Originally posted by: inspire
Originally posted by: piasabird
Nothing wrong with this except the prior abortions information. Similar kind of information is kept on people receiving financial aid or attending a state school.
What about demographic information on the father?
I wonder how the March of Dimes got all its information on Pre-term birth rates state by state?
I wonder how many abortions some of these late nite talk shows like lettermen cause.
I wonder if this is any worse than the questions on the US Census?
This violates the concept of informed consent and HIPAA. The Census is completely different. How are you folks not seeing this?
I do not see how any of this information qualifies as PHI. Forgive me if I am wrong, but as I recall, HIPAA protects information that can be used to identify the patient like SSN and name, and any documents with those items on them. HIPAA does not protect demographic information, which from what I see is everything on this list. I thought you could release data on patients that had identifiers removed, and things like marital status, education level income level are not identifiers. I will double check our HIPAA policies to see if I can confirm that.
Also, I can see how this demographic information could be helpful if it could be used to target social programs more effectively. However, I seriously doubt they are using this to do something good, so I would prefer to see this stopped unless the states has some decent justification.
Edit: quick update, Examples of information that can not be shared:
Name, address (other than town/city/state), phone, fax, email, SSN, Medical record #, health plan beneficiary #, Account #, certificate or License #, Vehicle identifiers, device identifiers, URLS, IP address (Wow, didn't expect that one), biometric identifiers, and photographs.
If the type of data is not on that list, it can be disclosed under HIPAA laws for research, public health or healthcare operations. And on second thought I can see this data being used in those ways, so I change my mind and have to stick my self firmly in the undecided, some good some bad category.