Date:
For Release: Immediately
Contact: HHS Press Office
(202) 690-6343
STATEMENT BY TOMMY G. THOMPSON
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Regarding New Federal Privacy Regulations
From the time of Hippocrates, privacy in medical care has
been of prime importance to patients and to the medical profession.
Today, as electronic data transmission is becoming ingrained in our health care
system, we have new challenges to insure that medical privacy is secured.
While many states have enacted laws giving differing degrees of protection,
there has never before been a federal standard defining and ensuring medical
privacy. Now new federal standards are coming into force to protect the
personal health information of every American patient.
As of Monday, April 14, millions of health plans, hospitals,
doctors and other health care providers around the country must comply with new
federal privacy regulations. To develop these regulations, the Department
of Health and Human Services went through an extensive process of consultation
and consensus that included reviewing and considering more than 100,000 public comments.
These new federal health privacy regulations set a national
floor of privacy protections that will reassure patients that their medical
records are kept confidential. The rules will help to ensure appropriate
privacy safeguards are in place as we harness information technologies to
improve the quality of care provided to patients. Consumers will benefit
from these new limits on the way their personal medical records may be used or
disclosed by those entrusted with this sensitive information.
The new protections give patients greater access to their
own medical records and more control over how their personal information is
used by their health plans and health care providers. Consumers will get
a notice explaining how their health plans, doctors, pharmacies and other
health care providers use, disclose and protect their personal
information. In addition, consumers will have the ability to see and copy
their health records and to request corrections of any errors included in their
records. Consumers may file complaints about privacy issues with their health
plans or providers or with our Office for Civil Rights.
The new rules also reflect a common-sense balance between
protecting patients' privacy and ensuring the best quality care for
patients. They do not interfere with the ability of doctors to treat
their patients, and they allow important public health activities, such as
tracking infectious disease outbreaks and reporting adverse drug events, to
continue. Over the past two years, we've worked aggressively to provide
doctors, hospitals and other covered entities with the information that they
need to comply with the rule. We've held a series of regional conferences
on the privacy regulations and participated in hundreds of other conferences
and meetings with those affected by the regulations. We've provided
extensive guidance and other technical assistance materials that clarify key provisions
of the rule, so those affected take the right steps but don't go overboard at
the expense of the quality of their patients' care. Many of these
materials, including an extensive collection of frequently asked questions, are
on our Web site at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/assist.html.
We will continue our efforts to encourage covered entities
to comply with the regulations' requirements. After all, this is the best
way to ensure that patients get the rights and protections that they
expect. Of course, we have all the enforcement options available to us
under the rule, including civil monetary penalties, and we will use them as and
when necessary to obtain our goal of protecting the confidentiality of personal
medical information.
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