Use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI) held by covered entities — including pharmacies — is strictly regulated under HIPAA. Covered entities may disclose PHI to facilitate treatment or payment without the patient’s authorization, but any other disclosure of PHI requires covered entities to obtain written authorization from the individual before disclosure. Furthermore, the covered entity must try to disclose only the minimum necessary information.
But just because HIPAA exists doesn’t mean private information isn’t shared, whether on purpose, or inadvertently. One of the most public places where personal medical information is communicated is at pharmacies, and patient privacy at pharmacies is far from ideal.
De-Identification of Protected Health Information Is Becoming More Difficult
In 2010, Americans filled 3.7 billion prescriptions at pharmacies. De-identified PHI is regularly shared by pharmacies with third parties for purposes of data mining and marketing. De-identified data is supposedly stripped of any identifying information that could match the information up with a particular person.
However, complete de-identification is, if anything, becoming more difficult due to increasingly sophisticated reverse engineering methods. There’s already anecdotal evidence that algorithms exist to re-identify PHI after it has supposedly been stripped of identifying information. Many entities seek out de-identified PHI, including pharmaceutical companies, clinical drug trial researchers, government officials, and employers.
Pharmacy Technicians Are Human
In 1998, a pharmacy technician working at a pharmacy in Mount Clemens, Michigan violated patient confidentiality by sharing information with her son about a pharmacy customer. In this case, the pharmacy tech was filling a prescription for HIV medication and realized the patient was the parent of one of her son’s classmates. The son then spread the information at school. The technician was in clear violation of HIPAA and Michigan state laws, and the patient sued her and the pharmacy for breach of privacy, eventually settling out of court. While situations like this one are extreme and rare, it does show that people employed by covered entities under HIPAA are human and sometimes engage in highly unprofessional behavior.
Pharmacies Are Public Places
In 2010 chain drugstore Rite Aid paid $1 million to settle HIPAA violation allegations and agreed to correct policies to better safeguard customer data after extensive privacy violations. The pharmacies were shown to have disposed of prescriptions and labeled bottles containing identifiable patient information in industrial trash containers that were accessible to the public. Such violations were reported at Rite Aid stores in many cities throughout the US. Not only did this expose customer information to the possibility of identity theft, it left private health information about specific individuals where it could be accessed by anyone willing to go through the trash containers.
eDrugstore Privacy Policy and You
eDrugstore.com is a covered entity under HIPAA and is committed to strict HIPAA compliance by taking physical, electronic, and procedural steps to safeguard and secure customer information. Furthermore, eDrugstore meets the highest standards for electronic security, with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology that guarantees that personal data is encrypted when transmitted. Finally, eDrugstore is the sole collector of customer personal identifying information and does not sell, rent, or otherwise share any of this information with third parties for marketing, data mining, or other purposes.
If you have questions for our pharmacists, you can call from the privacy of your home rather than standing in the corner of a crowded pharmacy. At eDrugstore, we know you safeguard your medical privacy carefully, and we respect that by making the security and privacy of customer medical, payment, and other personal information a top priority.
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