Second Negative

HIPAA & prayer

I haven’t mentioned it before, and may not again, but I work for a health insurance company. Although I don’t have a great deal to do with the insurance part of the business, the new HIPAA laws affecting privacy have been a priority for the company over the past year.

The HIPAA laws are meant to restrict disclosure of member/patient medical information. Simple enough. But beyond what I am required to do in order to obey the law, I hadn’t really thought about how that might affect other groups outside of the health care industry that use medical information that is technically confidential. Examples include church bulletins, prayer requests, etc.

Jeffrey Veen had an interesting post about the subject last week that I recommend.