[Med-privacy] HIPAA Privacy Rule Disclosures

[Peter Marshall]

  Coalition to HHS: Modify HIPAA Privacy Rule Disclosures
     Requirement ***

The American Hospital Association (AHA) and other healthcare  
organizations are again urging the Department of Health and Human  
Services (HHS) to exempt all disclosures to government entities from  
the HIPAA Privacy Rule's accounting of disclosures requirement. In a  
recent letter to new HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, AHA and other members  
of the Confidentiality Coalition note that the Government  
Accountability Office (GAO) also recommended exempting such disclosures  
from the rule in a report last September. The organizations called the  
accounting of disclosures requirement "extremely burdensome and costly"  
and said it was likely to become even more so with the development of  
interoperable electronic health records.

Read the letter:
http://www.hipaadvisory.com/news/newsarchives/2005/ 
aha0210acctdisclosures.pdf