How to keep your private health information — private!

Is your pharmacy sharing your most intimate health details with complete strangers?

00Any time you’re taking a prescription drug — whether it’s for something simple or serious — you want to believe your pharmacy is pulling out all the stops to keep your medical information safe.

After all, these are the same folks who make you wait behind that line on the floor when you’re picking up your meds.

But a new report has found that some of the largest pharmacy chains and health care providers in America are regularly committing serious privacy breaches that could allow your medical records to fall into the wrong hands.

It’s a serious invasion of privacy and our government isn’t lifting a finger to stop it.

But by knowing a few simple facts about your rights, you stand a good chance of keeping your most private health information safe.

There oughta be a law (wait — there is)Joseph Fenity was the guy you would get on the phone if you had a big complaint with CVS and asked to speak with a top honcho.

Like when a patient’s medications were accidentally sent to his neighbor, revealing he had cancer. Or the times when pharmacists loudly yelled private health information across the counter for everyone to hear.

And it was Fenity’s job was to reassure customers that these were one-in-a-million mistakes and that everything was fine.

Only it wasn’t.

And the day that Fenity’s own health details got publicized to his co-workers was the day he knew he couldn’t keep telling others that it would never happen again.

But CVS is just one of the top ten health providers who can’t seem to keep secrets any better than a first grader, according to a new report from ProPublica.

The organization reviewed three years of federal data on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and found hundreds of complaints against the top pharmacies and health care providers in America.

I’m talking about household names like CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Walmart, Lab Corp, Quest Diagnostics, and the number one offender — the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Now, as I’m sure you know, HIPAA is supposed to make sure that private patient information is kept, uh, private. But ProPublica found that the federal government almost never doles out punishment when your information is leaked.

For example, the VA was found to have violated privacy laws 220 times during the three-year period. But want to guess how many times it was punished?

Zero.

Same deal with CVS. More than 200 violations, and for the most part it’s gotten off scot-free.

While a lot of this out of our hands, there are still some measures we can take to keep our private info as private as possible.

For example:

• Pick up your prescriptions during non-peak hours when you can (avoid the morning, lunch hour and dinnertime rushes). That can keep prying eyes and ears from learning about your health problems or the drugs you’re taking.
• Always indicate how you want to be notified of things like appointments, test results, and when you need a refill. For example, you can specify that you should only be contacted at home and that information should be sealed in an envelope, rather than put on a post card.
• Remember that you have the right to ask that any treatment or medications you pay for in full not be revealed to your health insurer.
• If you’re lucky enough to have a local independent pharmacist in your area, walk on past the CVS and Walmart! You might not be able to do your grocery shopping there, but what you do buy will be no one’s business but your own.

Sources:
“Few consequences for health privacy law’s repeat offenders” Charles Ornstein, Annie Waldman, December 29, 2015, ProPublica, propublica.org