Activities/personal statement: would this be considered a HIPAA violation?

[Gcuvier]

Hey everyone,

A lot of my shadowing and another experience (which is one of my most meaningful experiences) includes work at a doctor's office in which I was once a patient. This fact is a huge part of my story, but I was wondering if mentioning I was once a patient at this office would count as a HIPAA violation/be frowned upon by adcoms.

Again, this clinic has been a big component in my journey to becoming a doctor, and would hate to have to exclude it.

Please advise.

Thanks in advance.

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[thumbz]

I don't think you can violate your own privacy...

Interested to see if anyone has any experiences otherwise

 

[voxveritatisetlucis]

no

 

[Maido]

Hijacking this thread because I've been wondering about HIPAA on applications for a few weeks. We write about our own shadowing and clinical experiences in our applications but wouldn't we be breaking HIPAA by mentioning specific patient stories? How does that work?

 

[Gcuvier]

I don't think you can violate your own privacy...

Interested to see if anyone has any experiences otherwise

I've wondered because I've been told that even looking up your own PHI/chart would be considered a violation.

 

[thumbz]

I've wondered because I've been told that even looking up your own PHI/chart would be considered a violation.

So that's true, you can't access your own chart (for some unknown reason). I'm assuming because you could add things to it, or delete things. As theoretically you could request records for every last word and number in your chart.

If talking about your own medical conditions and experiences was a HIPAA violation reality TV and Dr. Oz wouldn't exist.

To the other question of telling a patient story - it turns into a HIPAA violation if you include any information that would allow someone to reasonable identify the patient. For example, you write about patient X with T2DM and a diabetic foot infection - not a HIPAA violation. That could be any of 5% of Americans. You talk about Lou Gehrigs disease back when Lou was the only person who "had it", and boom you just violated HIPAA. A more relevant example for the real world is talking about specific tattoos or something like that. So don't tell a story about a guy with 3 swastikas on his chest who you treated for endocarditis because that could be identifying enough.

 

[Goro]

Hey everyone,

A lot of my shadowing and another experience (which is one of my most meaningful experiences) includes work at a doctor's office in which I was once a patient. This fact is a huge part of my story, but I was wondering if mentioning I was once a patient at this office would count as a HIPAA violation/be frowned upon by adcoms.

Again, this clinic has been a big component in my journey to becoming a doctor, and would hate to have to exclude it.

Please advise.

Thanks in advance.

Nope, not a violation.

 

[LizzyM]

To violate HIPAA, you need to be in possession of information that you obtained in a role with a covered entity (a health care provider or a business associate of a health care provider -- eg. a software firm that provides electronic medical records software or an insurance company.) Telling your own story is never a violation of HIPAA. Repeating information that was available to the public through the media is not a violation of HIPAA. You can say, "hearing that Colin Powell died of COVID despite having been vaccinated, piqued my interest in breakthrough infections and so I ...." and you have not broken the law.

If a person might be identifiable based on your description, and the information came to you while you were in a covered entity, it could be a violation. Even giving a date on the calendar is a violation. In other words, you might say that a 4 year old came to the emergency department having an asthma attack (not uncommon, happens all the time) but if you were to say that a 4 year old came to the emergency department on Halloween and you've included a variable that could identify that particular kid. (Your activities list is likely to include the name of the hospital where you were during that time frame which makes it all the more likely.)

All that said, even before HIPAA, physicians and those who aspire to the profession, should keep private what is said to them in private and respect the privacy of those who confide in them.

It might be hard to imagine but I do know of an adcom member who recognized that the inspiration for one applicant was the adcom member's own young son who had a disability and used some very distinctive adaptive equipment and who was a student at a school where the applicant had volunteered. The adcom member recused herself from review of the application but you never know what you write might be read by someone who knows the person you are writing about (fortunately for one applicant who mentioned my brother by name, the report of the medical care received was very complementary and, of course, writing about your own medical care is not a violation of HIPAA.)