Revisit limit on health records

The variety and seriousness of problems brought about by a new law restricting access to health-care information requires legislative action this winter. Several compelling examples of the unintended effects of the law show lawmakers overreached in their effort to shield patients.

Beginning Jan. 1, An Act to Provide for Confidentiality of Health Care Information will restrict patient information from hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and drug and insurance companies. Patients can authorize in writing the release of information and specify who may receive it.

The restrictions affect everyone. Family members who want to know how a relative is doing after a car crash; a widow seeking the records for insurance reimbursement; friends who simply want to send flowers all will have trouble getting specific information about a patient under the new law.

Journalists have a stake in this, too. When a public figure is hospitalized, reporters need a reliable source of information to report on his or her condition. When a violent crime has taken place, the public has a right to know what has happened. When hospitals make mistakes, the public needs to know why. Without a publicly available record, rumor prevails.

The impulse to protect a patient’s health information is natural and, for the most part, on target. The Information Age has made the records valuable commodities to aggressive insurance or marketing companies. But the law could and should recognize the difference between a single request for information about a patient and the demand for wholesale blocks of data to be used for commercial purposes.

Through judicious rewriting of the health confidentiality law to recognize the identified use of the information, a patient’s right to privacy can easily be balanced against the public need to know without sacrifice. U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s bill to protect a patient’s genetic information, included in the GOP’s Patient Bill of Rights, may provide a model for rethinking the Maine law.

Without changes, the law needlessly worries the families of patients, burdens hospitals with rules they do not need and too often leaves the public in the dark. The Legislature needs to re-examine the consequences of its work.