New York Times – free registration required Court Ruling Limits Prosecutors’ Access to Patient Records.
New York State’s highest court ruled yesterday that prosecutors cannot demand hospital medical records in their efforts to seek criminal suspects who have been wounded, because doing so infringes on patient confidentiality.
The decision by the Court of Appeals affects only cases that involve a doctor’s medical judgment. Where information about a possible crime is apparent to anyone — for instance, when wounds are readily visible on a patient’s face, or when a packet of drugs falls from a patient’s sock — prosecutors may enforce a subpoena for records, the court noted in its unanimous decision.
The decision also does not affect established legal exceptions to patient confidentiality, like gunshot wounds, certain communicable diseases, potential child abuse and even potentially fatal stab wounds.
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The Court of Appeals had reached an almost identical decision in 1983, ruling on a similar dispute between prosecutors and hospital officials in upstate New York.
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The Manhattan prosecutors had sought a way around the 1983 ruling. In the subpoenas last year, they demanded patients’ names, addresses and other information, “except any and all information acquired by a physician, registered nurse or licensed practical nurse in attending said patient in a professional capacity and which was necessary to enable said doctor and/or nurse to act in that capacity.”
But the Court of Appeals rejected that distinction, saying the prosecutors were seeking people with a particular type of injury — in this case a stab wound.
“The inherently medical nature of this judgment is not obviated by attempting to qualify it in terms of what a layperson might plainly observe,” wrote Justice Albert M. Rosenblatt, in an opinion joined by the court’s other six judges.
While there are some exceptions to medical privacy, the opinion said, “Patients should not fear that merely by obtaining emergency medical care they may lose the confidentiality of their medical records and their physicians’ medical determinations.”
[Privacy Digest]
