Why I Hate HIPPA

Today I got a call from a health care provider who I will be visiting in the near future for the first time.  I really appreciate an actual phone call to tell me information about my upcoming procedure but unfortunately she had to ask me some questions.  Maybe you can recount your whole life’s medical history, but I cannot.

Being as young as I am you would think I could remember all my previous surgeries, but apparently I am the perfect candidate for a medical information chip.  Health care workers don’t like generalities.  When I told the woman I had some kind of cyst removed and some other kind of laser thing to stop bleeding that could mean many things.  As this health professional tried to suggest the type of surgery I said yes to every answer when I was only supposed to pick one.  Hell, I was asleep during that surgery how was I supposed to know which type it was?

After all this questioning, where I certainly gave some incorrect answers, the woman asked me to get my primary physician to fax in my health records.  If she is getting my actual records why did she bother asking me the questions?  The answer sheet was going to be sent into her.

She started to tell me the fax number I should have my records sent to.   Whoa, whoa, whoa.  “You called me on my cell phone and I’m walking the dog.  Can you just e-mail me the number?” I logically asked, this being the second decade of the 2000’s.

The answer was absurd.  “No, we don’t have a secure portal.”  Was I suddenly in some episode of Star Trek circa 1965?  “Well, ” I followed up, “Can I just have my doctor e-mail you my records?”

“No, e-mail is not secure,” she informed me in that you-must-be-some-idiot-I-just-told-you tone.  What did I not understand about the secure portal?  “You must fax it.”  HIPPA you know.

What century are we in again?  I thought we had already established this.  Let’s discuss what is not secure.  She called me and although she asked if it was me who she had reached she had no way of knowing that I was whom I claimed to be when she called.  Anyone who picked up my phone could have pretended to be me when she asked.  So first, the phone call was not really secure.

Second, since when is a fax machine sitting in the middle of some office secure?  Is it in a guarded locked room?  Anyone working in that office could walk by the fax machine and pick up a load of medical records and no one would know they were missing because, hello, they just came in and got printed and sat there with no secondary verification system that they were coming or expected at that moment.

Have any of you ever tried to even get a message to your “primary” physician to ask them to FAX your records?  It could take days before they even respond to the voice mail you had to leave and were told on the outgoing message would not be responded to for at least 48 hours.

The whole system is so broken and made more aggravating by these poorly thought out HIPPA rules.  We have had to endure them long enough that we certainly have discovered six thousand flaws.  Isn’t it time we readjusted?

I am all for people taking good care of themselves, but HIPPA causes me to need more psychiatric care it drives me so crazy.   I am sure that the chip in my dog  and the reader system that all vets have to pull the information off it would work great on humans.  I am happy to be the first to volunteer to test it in humans if it means I never have to be questioned about my medical history or worse have to get it faxed anywhere ever again.  Maybe I should just see if my vet could take me on as a patient?

Note to all my non-US readers– HIPPA is a governmental regulation that tries to protect peoples medical information privacy.  Heaven forbid you enter the hospital unconscious.