Personal Health Information

Privacy is a big topic when it comes to Emergency Medical Services.   Patients share all sorts of personal information with health care providers and there are laws and regulations in effect in order to protect this private information.  The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996 in order to better protect peoples private health information. 

 This act is broken down into two main Titles which outline the act and what it covers.  The second Title is most relevant to what I do as an EMT and covers the prevention of health care fraud and abuse.  In the second title there is a section about health care providers and patient information.  This section includes a Privacy Rule which regulates the use and disclosure of certain information held by “covered entities” such as EMT’s, health insurance companies, and hospital staff.  

What this basically means for me is that I am required by law to keep Personal Health Information disclosed by patients confidential.   Whenever the ambulance transports patients, we are required to have them sign a paper that says that they understand HIPAA and that any information they share with the EMS personnel is kept confidential.  The EMTs also verbally tell the patients that any information that they share with us is kept confidential and can only be shared by us, their health insurance companies, and the medical staff at the hospital.  Emergency health providers also perform other precautions in order to keep information confidential and safe from the media, criminals, and the general public.  One of these precautions is that when the ambulance has paperwork signed by a patient, we place the papers in a locked box within the firehouse so that it is impossible for anybody but the station officer to gain access to the Personal Health Information.  Health care providers take this matter very seriously and we understand how important keeping information like health history confidential is.          

   

Personal and private information is much less, well, private that it used to be.  Advancements in the internet and information sharing have made what used to be private information now available for the public.  I have conducted a small experiment where I picked a random person that I knew and tried to find out as much information about this person as possible only using the internet.   My results were quite scary and really showed how much personal information is made public on the internet.  I was able to find information about where his house is located, what his parents names and phone numbers are, and where he went to high school.   On this flip side, however, I was unable to find any health related information about this person.  I am glad that this information is so well protected and hard to gain access to.  I personally feel very exposed knowing how much of my information is available to the public, though I am glad that nobody can Google my name and learn that I had a serious health disorder as a child or something like that.  For more information about HIPAA and Personal Health Information, follow the link below.

Source:

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/