HIPPA Violation? Chemo Infusion Room

[yotakagirl]

When I take my mother to her chemo treatments at an outpatient infusion room the patients sit very close together and their doctors always come to see them as they get their treatments. The man next to me saw his doctor and I could hear every little gritty detail about how his cancer was metastasizing and they were going to have to do this and that...

I just have such a hard time understanding how it's okay to talk about such sensitive information in front of strangers. I'm only pre-nursing but both my parents are nurses. My mother always tells me that HIPAA is a joke and no one follows it. Is this really a sentiment felt by most nurses and most hospitals? Is what I experience in the infusion room a violation? Does it even matter?

[yotakagirl]

I think you must have been lucky so far... Also, I'm not sure how long you've been a nurse or what part of the country but perhaps it has to do with the time period and where she worked... Anyway, my mom didn't like being a nurse but she had very high standards for patient care so perhaps that's why she is so critical. Hard for me to say exactly but I do know she's witnessed some bad stuff at a minimum.

[klone, MSN, RN]

How long ago did your mother leave nursing? HIPAA is a fairly new "thing" in the grand scheme of things, and as time goes on (and facilities get dinged for violations) more and more places take privacy laws WAY more seriously than they did 20 or even 10 years ago. So perhaps in your mother's time in nursing, privacy laws weren't taken as seriously, but they certainly are now (especially with the ubiquitousness of social media, where it's SO much easier to violate privacy to a huge audience).

[yotakagirl]

Wow. I do think it's been 10 years or a little more since she worked... Makes a lot of sense.

[BuckyBadgerRN, ASN, RN]

Ask any healthcare worker who has been terminated over a HIPAA violation. They'd have to disagree wholeheartedly with your mother who thinks it's a joke.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

There are also a lot of people who think "HIPAA is a joke" because they don't know its provisions. For example, when I used to do work comp case management I routinely asked for copies of office notes, and very often got told, "I can't give you that because of HIPAA." Then when I did get it, they thought it was a joke because their patients weren't "protected." What they didn't understand was that work comp is an insurance product, and HIPAA specifically says that PHI about care that insurance is paying for must be provided to the carrier.