How 'Julie' got a big surprise about medical records privacy

She was using the name Julie, but it wasn't her real name, she said. She is a lawyer, but she doesn't practice law anymore. She is employed in the public sector, near Boston, where she had sought treatment from a big-name healthcare organization.

The reasons for these obfuscations were made plain to attendees of the 2nd Annual International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy this month in Washington.

Julie had spoken there, serving as a star witness as to just how contemptuous our healthcare system can be of patients and their rights and their needs to keep some or all of their medical records private.

I interviewed Julie after her talk.

She repeated to me what she had told her summit audience: that she had gone to the big-name organization to see a psychotherapist.

"When I first came to see her, she told me the privacy policy," Julie said—that nothing said during the therapy sessions would be distributed. So, beginning in 2002, she poured it out—her family troubles, personal issues, being a victim of sexual abuse. "When she first started, she was taking notes on paper," Julie said. Computerization came later. "I went to weekly sessions, sometimes one every two weeks, for six years."

In 2008, she said, she went to the same organization, where her gynecologist and primary-care physicians also practiced, because had stomach pain.

"I went to my primary's office, but because she wasn't in, I went to another doctor there"—a man she'd never seen before, Julie said.

"He was acting so strangely," she recalled. "Instead of examining my stomach, he asked me if I was seeing a psychiatrist."

"I was really shocked," she said. "He told me he'd read the therapy notes. He'd read enough to know some of the things I discussed in therapy were sexual abuse. I think that's why he was afraid to examine me."

He need not have worried, she said. "My mental state was very, very stable and has been for many years. My therapist wrote that was one of the reasons I ended therapy."

But, she said, that physician, whom she'd never met before, had read "stuff I don't even tell my family or my closest friends."

It felt as if the events in those records were happening all over again, Julie said.

"It makes me feel sick, just having a complete stranger know that about me," she said. "It feels like a complete violation."

Julie figured she could fix this. She'd write to someone in a position of authority at the big-name organization and point out they'd mixed her therapy records with those of her regular care.

"I thought it was a mistake that can be easily corrected," she said, but, "this is where the story gets really frustrating."

And this is where I'll stop today.

I'll tell the rest of Julie's story–and our story, really—tomorrow.

Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn.