HIPAA Didn’t Kill the Radio Star

I wish I could claim credit for the title of the blog post title, the article title, or the article itself. Only I can’t since it was written by lawyers who know EMS and medical law. It’s an article that every EMS provider and dispatcher should read. It attacks common myths about EMS dispatch and HIPAA.

Not to mention all those experts out in scanner land who think that HIPAA requires encryption of EMS dispatch or hospital notification traffic.

Or those fire service and EMS bosses who use HIPAA as an excuse to request outlandish sums of money for expensive encrypted radio services. Their bosses should read this article too, so they can see that they are being fed big heaping servings of cow poop.

Here is the opening paragraph of the article, which is all I’ll quote. You should go and read the rest.

The dawn of the age of HIPAA did not mark the demise of emergency medical dispatch (EMD) as we knew it. Nonetheless, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) did create some confusion regarding our traditional practices of communicating patient information over the radio airwaves. Our law firm still gets regular inquiries about dispatch-related issues, ranging from whether you can say the patient’s name over the radio to whether ambulance services have to use encrypted radio transmissions for dispatch communications. Most often, these questions are motivated by legitimate concerns about patient privacy, but they are often fueled by overzealous—and ultimately unfounded—interpretations of what HIPAA actually requires. Fortunately, much of the debate concerning HIPAA and EMD transmissions can be easily resolved, because HIPAA broadly permits ambulance services and dispatch agencies to communicate any treatment-related information over the airwaves.

That is all.