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| Posted at: 2/23/2009 12:47:48 PM |
| Headline: HITECH Act |
| Expire Time: 9/25/2010 |
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February 17, 2009
Dear Affiliated Society Member,
The President has signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (H.R. 1), which includes the HITECH Act on rules for the use of electronic health information. There are some important elements that affect clinical social workers.
The bill contains the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health or "HITECH Act" (at Title XIII), about which I have sent several alerts. I am happy to report that this form of the HITECH Act is much better than any of the previous bills regarding privacy and privilege,including the original HITECH Act.
There was a last minute consideration of the removal of the patient-psychotherapist privilege, granted by the Supreme Court (1996)in Jaffee v. Redmond. This would have been a terrible blow to the cornerstone of our clinical work. Due to much work by mental health associations, the bill instead has a protection of privilege, stating that nothing in the Subtitle on privacy will constitute a waiver of "any privilege otherwise applicable to an individual with respect to the protected health information of such individual." Section 13421(c).
Additionally the bill includes the following protections of health care information:
· Patient notification of all disclosures without consent, or "breaches", of protected health information;
· Creation of an Health Information Technology Policy Commission charged, among other things, with creating electronic records which will "segment" or separate mental health information (and other sensitive information) from the general record with greater privacy protection;
· Encryption of patient information when sent outside a health care network;
· Audit trails to determine who has accessed health care information and for what purpose;
· The right of the provider to determine what "minimum necessary" information is for disclosures (the Secretary may issue guidelines later); and
· Opt-in requirements for sale of patient information, i.e., patients must consent in writing to the sale of their health care information.
Finally, there will be grant money available for providers who need financial assistance for building an electronic health care record. I will let you know as I learn more about the details of this option.
Thanks to all of you who responded to alerts on health information technology. You contributed to making privacy protection of health care records much stronger.
Laura Groshong, LICSW, Director, Government Relations
Clinical Social Work Association
lwgroshong@clinicalsocialworkassociation.org
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