AIS Health has an article on a troubling case previously discussed on this blog involving two Gila Medical Center physicians who cooperated with police requests for increasingly invasive body searches of a man suspected of hiding drugs in his body. The article begins:
Hospital privacy officers on the job long enough have their share of law enforcement representatives who wave handcuffs around hoping to convince medical staff to do what they want, and have fielded some wild requests that strain legal limits from the men (and women) in blue. Hopefully, the HIPAA training privacy officers have done keeps workers from breaking the law, or at least prompts unsure employees to contact them for advice.
But what happened in southwestern New Mexico has baffled even longtime HIPAA experts, and once again gives rise to a discussion about what covered entities (CEs) can versus must do when faced with law enforcement demands or requests.
The allegations laid out in a federal suit filed in the U.S. District Court in New Mexico against Gila Medical Center in Silver City, N.M., and two of its physicians, along with a handful of local police and sheriff’s deputies and a deputy district attorney, tell of a bizarre incident in January in which a man was subjected without his consent to medical procedures, including three enemas, abdominal X-rays and a colonoscopy under anesthesia, at Gila Medical Center.
Read more of this article from Report on Patient Privacy on AIS Health.