Is Your Medical Information Really Private?

July 23 -- Think of the painfully personal details we share with doctors, nurses, health-care insurers, and pharmacists everyday. Think it's all private? Think again.

Two ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios illustrate the murky parameters of our medical privacy.

In Florida, an unknown number of residents recently received samples of unsolicited Prozac in the mail, apparently the result of their health records being used for marketing purposes. Prosecutors are investigating the antidepressant's manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co., drugstore chain Walgreen Co. and a Florida doctor's group, but it remains unclear whether the mailings were actually illegal.

In a separate but similar case, the Florida-based Eckerd Corp. pharmacy chain recently got in hot water for selling its customer database to drug companies for marketing materials.

Depending on what state you're in, these practices could be perfectly legal and even commonplace.

"What might have been considered unethical or unthinkable 10 years ago is now just considered part of doing business in the health-care field," said Janlori Goldman, director of the Health Privacy Project at Georgetown University.

In another recent case, a judge in Iowa has ordered a Planned Parenthood clinic to turn over reams of pregnancy tests so local police can cull the records in search of a woman who abandoned a baby who later died.

The clinic's director refuses to hand over the records, and may go to jail if her appeal to the state Supreme Court fails.

"This could be any clinic in America for any test you name," said director Jill June. "If they do it to the women in Storm Lake, Iowa, that puts any test taken by any person in the country at risk of disclosure."

Will New Rules Jeopardize Privacy?

To hear some privacy advocates tell it, every test taken by any person in this country is already at risk of disclosure, and will be even more so when federal medical privacy regulations take effect next April.

"People have to learn that medical records confidentiality is not something that can be assumed," said Robert Gellman, a Washington, D.C., health privacy consultant.