Nurses: Medical records must be kept confidential
Nurses: Medical records must be kept confidential
Group lobbies Congress for employee protection
Attendees at the recent Conference of Leaders sponsored by the Atlanta-based American Association of Occupational Health Nurses (AAOHN) converged on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress for a national law protecting the confidentiality of employee health records.
Health information privacy continues to be a major issue for AAOHN, says Kae Livsey, the organization’s governmental affairs manager. Because occupational health practitioners are in the "middle guy" position between employers and employees, they often find themselves in awkward positions when managers and other employer representatives seek medical information about employees, she says.
"The employer just needs to know if someone can safely perform their job and not endanger anyone else. Occupational health professionals should not have to turn over records to managers or face being fired for insubordination. They have an ethical responsibility to maintain confidentiality, but the law now does not support their ethics. We want a law that limits the amount of information disclosed to that which is absolutely necessary," Livsey explains.
Presently, only a handful of states have enacted laws protecting employee medical records from employer scrutiny, leaving practitioners without legal backup if they refuse demands for privileged information from employee health records. (See the case of one hospital employee health nurse manager who was fired for refusing to turn over an employee’s medical records to an administrator, Hospital Employee Health, November 1996, pp. 121-124.)
Federal statutes currently guarantee confidentiality of medical information only in connection with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Health Care Reform Act of 1996 sets an August 1999 deadline for Congress to act on privacy of health care information, but Livsey is concerned that the date may be extended.
"We’re urging Congress to deal with this next year," she says. "It needs to be a broad, comprehensive action that would provide protection for health information collected at work so the occupational health professional can be the one who decides, on the basis of the medical records, if an employee is capable of performing a job, and not have to turn over all the information to a manager to determine that."
In testimony before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee earlier this year, AAOHN president Bonnie Rogers, DrPH, COHN-S, RN, FAAN, emphasized the need for a broad definition of health information, limited disclosure of health information without an employee’s consent, and strong penalties for inappropriate disclosure.
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