| New Medical Privacy Rules Take Effect Monday Monday 14 April 18:00 GMT |
| By Lisa Richwine |
| WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Patients will have the right to view and in certain cases restrict the sharing of their personal health |
| information as the first federal safeguards for medical records take effect on Monday. Millions of doctors, hospitals, health |
| plans and others must comply with the medical privacy rules, which cover abroad range of practices but are not as strong as |
| some patient advocates had hoped. The rules require providers to give patients a notice detailing how their information will |
| be used. Patients will have rights to view and copy their records and request corrections to errors. Most "non-routine" |
| disclosures, such as giving information about an employee to an employer, will be forbidden without the patient's |
| permission. Smaller steps, too, will be made to keep as much information as possible confidential. For example, sign-in |
| sheets in doctors' offices should not display patients' medical problems, the Department of Health and Human Services |
| advises. "These new federal health privacy regulations set a national floor of privacy protections that will reassure patients |
| that their medical records are kept confidential," HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson said in a statement. Patient records have |
| been covered by varying state laws, and states may require stronger protections. The federal rules were issued by former |
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President Bill Clinton shortly before he left office in January 2001. The Bush administration agreed to implement them but |
| made changes that critics said significantly weakened the protections. The Bush version removed a mandate that providers |
| Officials said that obtain patients' consent for disclosing information for purposes of treatment, payment and other healthcare |
| operations. could have interfered with medical care. They instead required notification of information-sharing practices. Last |
| week, a coalition of consumers and health care providers challenged the rules in court, saying the lack of a consent |
| requirement actually results in broader access to patients' files for insurers, law enforcement and others. While the rules |
| are not as sweeping as some advocated, they do offer meaningful protections that hopefully will make people comfortable |
| being open with their doctors, said Janlori Goldman, director of the Health Privacy Project, a consumer group. "We will start |
| to see some major changes in the health care industry in terms of having privacy built in," she said. |