Shifts in Health Information

To the Editor: In their Sounding Board article on shifts in health information, Mandl and Kohane (April 17 issue) 1 observe that “companies providing PCHRs [personally controlled health records] are not covered entities under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),” but inco...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe New England journal of medicine Vol. 359; no. 2; pp. 209 - 210
Main Authors Yasnoff, William A, Peel, Deborah C, Pyles, James C
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Massachusetts Medical Society 10.07.2008
Subjects
Confidentiality - legislation & jurisprudence
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
Humans
Medical Informatics - trends
Medical Records - legislation & jurisprudence
Medical Records Systems, Computerized - legislation & jurisprudence
United States
United States
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Summary:To the Editor: In their Sounding Board article on shifts in health information, Mandl and Kohane (April 17 issue) 1 observe that “companies providing PCHRs [personally controlled health records] are not covered entities under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),” but incorrectly suggest that extending HIPAA to them would improve privacy. Publicly available PCHR systems are already prohibited from releasing information to private parties without the consent of the account holder under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act. 2 However, HIPAA's privacy rule provision for disclosure without consent for “treatment, payment, or healthcare operations” (TPO) actually eliminates privacy. Although it . . .
Bibliography:SourceType-Other Sources-1
content type line 63
ObjectType-Correspondence-1
ObjectType-Commentary-2
ISSN:0028-4793
1533-4406
DOI:10.1056/NEJMc081118