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anecdata - in Berkeley CA, in the late 2010s, two individuals showed up to be in the fast-paced AD scene. One was from a former Soviet Union country, who spoke English pretty well .. and the other a woman from Columbia .. to say that both of these two were "aggressive" is an understatement. He spoke English, she was in charge of "security" .. after a very few meetups, they both formed a company for "Ad tech for Hospi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HIPAA as a law is intended to ease transfer of medical information, not restrict it.
"The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is a US federal law designed to protect sensitive patient health information from disclosure without consent."
(I work in healthcare-adjacent and have met with many lawyers and had to explain them all about "HIPAA compliance"; my comment was not made from ignorance, but practical experience based on learning about how the law is used. There is a privacy rule in it, but that was not the real intent of the law. The intent was to make it easy to keep your health care when you moved between jobs.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HIPAA as a law is intended to ease transfer of medical information, not restrict it.
That's not true. It's intended to define a regulated and standard means of transferring medical information while ensuring confidentiality and patient privacy. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg... You have to explicitly grant permission for your data to be sold. What's very likely is that either the healthcare provider or insurance company included a request for authorization to sell that d…
It should be illegal to send the data, and illegal to accept it; burn both sides of that bridge.
update: Yeah, my bad. The point of this comment was to express my increasing cynicism at how we just keep seeing this kind of corporate behavior over and over again and how even when a tiny win is achieved on things like data collection, right to repair, ease for cancelling subscriptions, privacy, and so on and so on, they are so quickly over taken by new tactics or clawbacks/loopholes/non-enforcement of those laws. HN comments was probably the wrong place to vent and its too late to delete it.
It should be illegal to send the data, and illegal to accept it; burn both sides of that bridge.
How is this not a HIPAA violation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HIPAA as a law is intended to ease transfer of medical information, not restrict it.
"The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is a US federal law designed to protect sensitive patient health information from disclosure without consent."
How is this not a HIPAA violation?
HIPAA as a law is intended to ease transfer of medical information, not restrict it.
Honestly, we're better off with it than without it, speaking as someone with exposure to that industry's internals. That act drives a lot of good security practice within the organizations (mostly liability shifting, but still good). Specifically, the fear it instills of ruinous penalties from regulators drives good practice adoption, IME.
Further, multiple crappy patient portals across providers is a crummy experience, but it's an improvement over the world where providers held the data hostage and had zero interest in accommodating your requests for it, or even the idea that you owned it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 is a US federal law designed to protect sensitive patient health information from disclosure without consent."
Could you please cite the source for that quote? I looked for it, but couldn't find a source; it seems like an AI hallucination.
I highlighted SirFatty's text, looked up on google and first result show it near verbatim on cdc.gov.
https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/php/resources/health-insurance-port...