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Patient’s Guide to HIPAA: How to Use the Law to Guard your Health Privacy

Prepared by Robert Gellman for the World Privacy Forum

With assistance from Pam Dixon, executive director World Privacy Forum, John Fanning, former privacy advocate, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Lewis Lorton, health technology and privacy expert. Robert Gellman and the World Privacy Forum take responsibility for the judgments and accuracy of information in this guide. Nothing in this guide constitutes legal advice.

How to Use This Guide

You can access the Guide here, or you can use the drop-down menu containing all the parts of the Guide at the top of each page.

The Guide offers a roadmap through the thicket of dense health privacy laws and rules that many patients have questions about. The purpose of this guide is to help patients cut through the red tape and understand how to make health privacy laws work to protect their privacy.

The Guide is written for patients, and uses a Frequently Asked Questions and Answers format. The Guide focuses mostly on the federal health privacy rule known as HIPAA. This federal privacy rule establishes a baseline of protection that applies to health care providers and health care insurers throughout the United States. The guide also discusses other federal laws that cover some medical records. This guide does not offer detailed, technical explanations for every provision and every nuance of HIPAA. Instead, this guide concentrates on those parts of HIPAA that will be most helpful to real people. This guide does not offer a review of state law, and you need to know that a stronger state law can provide additional privacy protections.

You can use the Index to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to jump to the part of the Guide that covers your particular question or problem, or you can navigate through the Guide using the drop down menus at the top of each page.

Quick Start

• Reminder: This Guide is in the form of Frequently Asked Questions and Answers. You can access the guide here, or access the Guide through the drop-down menus at the top of each page.
• For a list of all questions and answers included in this guide, please see the complete list of questions in the HIPAA Guide Index to FAQs.
• If you have general questions about HIPAA, jump to Part 1, Learning about HIPAA.
• If you have questions about your rights under HIPAA, jump to Part 2, Basic Patient Rights.
• If you have questions about signing consent forms and other forms at your doctor’s office or at a hospital, jump to Part 3, What You Should Know About Uses and Disclosures.

More navigation tips

You can navigate through the HIPAA Guide several ways:

• You can use the HIPAA Guide Index to FAQs as your starting page. This page lists all of the frequently asked questions about HIPAA that the Guide covers. To get to the information, click on any question you see in the index.
• On any page in this guide you can click on the links in the green menu bar at the top of the HIPAA Guide web pages. The links for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are followed by abbreviated descriptions of each FAQ in the section.
• If you want to see big chunks of the guide all at once, you can see all of the FAQs in the Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 by clicking on those links in either the Index or on the menu bar at the top of this page.
• We do not offer the Guide in one single document; the Index to FAQs and the drop-down menu are the Guide.

Originally posted March 31, 2009

Guide design and logos John Boak of BoakArt