The greatest fear of many patients receiving therapy services is that somehow the details of their private struggles will be revealed publicly.
[...] Short Hills Associates in Clinical Psychology, a group based in New Jersey, has filed dozens of collections lawsuits against patients and included in them their names, diagnoses and listings of their treatments.
[...] In cases in which the patients were minors, the practice sued their parents and included the children's names and diagnoses.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA, allows health providers to sue patients over unpaid debts, but requires that they disclose only the minimum information necessary to pursue them.
Still, the law has many loopholes, which ProPublica has been exploring in a series of articles this year. One is that HIPAA covers only providers who submit data electronically — and apparently Short Hills Associates does not.
Who would have guessed that using paper instead of electronic records would make disclosure of confidential medical information more likely?
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Wired and others report that ProPublica has become the first "major" news outlet to launch a version of the site using Tor:
On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a "hidden service" on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site's news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica's website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.
"Everyone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind," says Mike Tigas, ProPublica's developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. "We don't want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read."
ProPublica accepts news tips using a SecureDrop hidden service. The recent move to include a Tor hidden site was motivated by concerns that Chinese readers could be put at risk by reading reports about the country's Web censorship.
The site can be reached at: propub3r6espa33w.onion
ProPublica often collaborates with The New York Times, NPR, PBS, The Intercept and others to publish stories. Here are a few ProPublica stories that have made it to our front page:
Somebody's Already Using Verizon's ID to Track Users
Fines Remain Rare as Health Data Breaches Multiply
NSA Monitors Americans' International Internet Traffic to Hunt Hackers for FBI
Fairview: AT&T's Collaborative Relationship with NSA Revealed
Psychology Practice Revealed Patients' Mental Disorders in Debt Lawsuits
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @12:05PM
that's insane.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday December 27 2015, @01:02AM
They had to specify all this information, to uniquely identify the target of the lawsuit. Otherwise, it could be any one of a number of people named "Jim Turner" residing at 300 South Beach St., SF, CA.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by fliptop on Saturday December 26 2015, @04:01PM
I think it's more of a case of people who don't pay their bills (whether their records are electronic or not) increases the likelihood of having their information disclosed.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:33PM
Uh no. Was it really so hard to RTFS? HIPPA makes it legal to disclose when its on paper, but illegal when it is on a computer.
Sounds like you've let your moral sanctimony blind you to the whole truth. Seems to be a pretty common thing around here.
(Score: 3, Touché) by sjames on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:51PM
Yes, those children absolutely should have quit elementary school and gotten a job to pay their debts...Or perhaps not.
You're also assuming those debts were all valid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 26 2015, @10:56PM
It may be premature to give up on Hipaa.
I'd bet that somewhere in the process, somebody used electronic means to transfer information.