Tag Archives: physician

It was a pleasure to be on a panel with members of the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General last week at the Massachusetts Medical Society to talk about how physicians can protect health information in our presentation entitled:  “Protecting Health Information: Health Data Security Training.”   We covered the latest in federal law (HIPAA, HITECH) and Massachusetts law. More

The case of Dr. Alexandra Thran should cure any physician of the desire to discuss a patient on Facebook.  Dr. Thran has been reprimanded by her state’s Medical Board and lost her emergency room privileges. Although the posting in question did not list the patient’s name, Dr. Thran provided enough details so that at least one other person could identify the patient. The result was irreparable damage to her career. 

In an article in the most recent Annals of Internal Medicine discussing this case, the author referred to Facebook as the “new elevator.” … More

I give my perspective on issues of physician privacy in this video from The HealthCare Channel, including:

• Can physicians challenge online review sites such as Health Grades or Vitals.com to have critical patient comments removed?
• The Supreme Court will rule soon on the case against the State of Vermont and the law banning the sale of prescription data to companies for use in marketing to those physicians.  …

More

Does the “compelling need” for patient records by a state body that oversees and regulates physicians trump the statute that protects the confidentiality of psychotherapy records?  Not in Massachusetts, according to a September 2, 2010 decision of the Supreme Judicial Court, Board of Registration in Medicine v. John Doe, No. SJC-10556.

At issue in this case were the treatment practices of a board-certified psychiatrist who specialized in “pain management.” Due to a concern that inappropriate prescriptions for pain medication were being written and that Doe himself was impaired,… More