On Monday, the Office of Civil Rights released (in the Code of Federal Regulations) a Request for Information related to implementation of the Accounting of Disclosures changes mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and specifically the HITECH Act. The Act requires that disclosures for treatment, payment and operations must now be accounted for if, requested by the patient and if the covered entity uses an electronic health record. This change is substantially different from the original Privacy Rule which only required accounting for those PHI disclosures that were not treatment, payment or operations or subject to a patient’s written authorization.

As you can imagine this may be a very burdensome requirement both for the vendors of electronic health records and covered entities; physicians and hospitals alike generate thousands of routine disclosures of PHI every year (for example submitting insurance claims). OCR recognizes this burden and has asked for public comment on the impact of this requirement. THE Consortium and The Colorado Rural Health Center will be submitting comments that advocate for a less burdensome approach!