Readers here yesterday will recall the first half of the story of Julie, the pseudonym of a Boston-area lawyer who spoke at a healthcare privacy conference in Washington this month.
Julie said she began psychotherapy sessions in 2002. At the time, she was assured records of those sessions would be kept private.
But Julie said she learned in 2008 that a primary-care physician she was seeing for a stomachache had read notes from her years of psychotherapy.
Here's the rest of her story:
Julie said she first appealed to authorities at the big-name healthcare organization where she received care, seeking what she thought would be a quick fix: segregation of her therapist's notes from the rest of her records.
"There is supposed to be protection for what's called psychotherapy notes," she said. "Those are not allowed to be in the record."
Instead, someone at the big-name healthcare organization blithely told her it had "interpreted that what was in my record were not psychotherapy notes; those were psychiatric records. They said they were not going to segregate psychiatric records. It's a disservice to their patients."
Disservice?
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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.
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The year the dot-com bubble burst, 2001, the three largest pharmacy benefit management companies launched RxHub, an electronic prescribing network, and the two main pharmacy associations created its rival, Surescripts.
While the two exchanges battled for supremacy, both promoted the common cause, e-prescribing, as a patient-safety issue and funded a grind-it-out marketing campaign that cost millions of dollars to sustain.
I had lunch the other day with physician information technology leader Dr. Harry Greenspun, who recalled those days, saying, for years "you couldn't swing a dead cat" in health IT circles without hitting Kevin Hutchinson, Surescripts' then-omnipresent CEO.
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