It’s okay to smile for the camera
I was asked by a grad student last week about hospitals establishing photography policies in light of HIPAA concerns.
There’s a balancing act between maintaining an open care environment (people generally like to take pictures of newborns and other happy events) and the privacy of other patients in the hospital.
That said, fortunately, the types of allowable photo opportunities inside a hospital are pretty limited to those happy moments and so can be isolated to a fair degree. In so doing, it becomes fairly simple to identify those photographic pursuits that would be prohibited.
In the case of photography without permission, it's more a case of regular privacy and, for all intents and purposes, customer relations as opposed to a HIPAA issue. HIPAA, at its fundamental core focuses on “protected health information,” or PHI.
In the first years of HIPAA, there was a lot of angst about what this meant --for instance, some hospitals went to the extreme of not providing any information about patients over the phone, even to verify the patient was actually a patient!
Lately, things have reached more of an even keel as the definition of PHI becomes clearer. Basically PHI involves any information that specifically identifies the patient and his or her diagnosis. If you don't have both elements in place, then you don't have PHI, and if there is no unauthorized release of that combo, there’s no HIPAA violation.
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