Visitation Fail

[chiashurb]

Thursday morning, at the jail:

Me: Hey, I'm here to visit $client!
Sgt. Friendly: Oh, he's not here.  He's at the $jailhospital.  Not doing well.
Me: Oh jeeze, thanks.

Me: [calls $jailhospital, gets through to the Lt.]
Me: Hey, it's $chiashurb from the public defenders' office.  I hear that $client is currently at $jailhospital.
Lt: Yessir.
Me: Can you

Comments

The glory...

[rialian]

===This sounds a fair bit like the bad side of HIPPA...the downside to having legislate and enforce proper discretion is that the rules overrule intelligent discretion.

Re: The glory...

[chiashurb]

This isn't HIPAA. The jail system's records of where its inmates are housed are not covered by HIPAA (or any other privacy law). As far as the hospital, HHS regs allow hospitals to give out general condition and location in the facility to anybody asking for the patient by name, unless the patient has explicitly asked to keep this confidential. And most hospitals do routinely give that information out.

The health care people were the easy part of this, it was the jail people that gave me the runaround.

[rialian]

===I do wonder if THEY think it is under something like HIPPA...part of the problem may be that the systems interact so much that you are seeing a sort of rules/belief blending...and possibly just plain intentional twittery. (Grins)

[heron61]

That makes sense - they think that all medical info should be private, are clueless about exactly what needs to be kept private, and don't want to get in trouble, and so provide no info at all.

[thewronghands]

How amazingly unhelpful. I'm sorry you got the runaround... and when one thinks of how many zillions of times this is happening, over how many zillions of clients... oof.