Re: What is and is NOT the medical record?

[Dick Mills <dmills@albany.net>]

Robert Gellman wrote:
> For the most part, there is a tremendous lack of clear rules.

A lack of clear rules I can imagine, but isn't there a good body of 
case law by now?  I thought that medical records are subpoenaed
regularly.
If so then there must have been disputes over what may be excluded.
Does anyone know?

I have a couple of other questions about what will be included in the
on-line records mandated by the "administrative simplification"  
maybe someone knows the answers, maybe nobody.

There was a new Supreme Court decision in June this year that 
psychiatric records could not be subpoenaed for use in Federal courts.
They held that the need for privacy overrides the need to know.
Will this be applied to exclude these same records from the national
data banks?

The Bennett bill, which we didn't get, contained a clause to the effect
that existing Federal laws would not be invalidated.  I think it was
referring to Federal laws restricting access to drug and alcohol
treatment
medical records, and it was the intent of the Bennet bill to let these
laws
stand.  The administrative simplification to Kennedy/Kasselbaum
doesn't have this clause.  Does that mean that it overrides or repeals
the existing Federal privacy laws?

What happens now that the bill is signed but proposed rules to protect
privacy are years away?  Is it a free-for-all with the Feds able to
mandate
gathering of any and all medical data with no restrictions at all on its
use
and release?  Or will there be a moratorium on the initiation of the
data
bases until the rules are established?
-- 
Dick Mills                    O-      http://www.albany.net/~dmills 
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -
Wilde