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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> “They tried to drag my start-up wine-and-spirits technology business into it … They posted my entire medical record, including notes about my mental health, my bills, my insurance info, my driver’s license, birth date and home address,” she said.

That screams HIPAA violation, to me. The practice could (and should) be shut down over it.

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I'm curious if that is accurate or not. It hangs in a weird way in the article and doesn't indicate where the info was posted.

Maybe she means all that info was exposed in the court case?

That's exactly the sort of "true but out of context" thing a tabloid like this site would use.

This is how I interpreted it, eg, that they released all the information in the court case.

even if this is not accurate and the woman exaggerated her claims, just look at all the comments in this post. She already got the effect she was looking for.

People freak out the moment they hear privacy violation. They get angry and stop thinking. The comment above from AdmiralAsshat already says "the practice should be shut down". Some comments above say "it's an open and shut case" without even knowing the details of the proceedings.

Can you imagine if as a doctor, you kept your patient's info private, but a patients says you "posted her medical record" even though it was sealed for her court proceedings? Wow

Almost certainly the medical details were shared with the court, under seal, rather than posted to (for example) a public internet forum.

At issue here is a disagreement over what services were performed, so it makes perfect sense that the court would require access to these documents.

The reporting is incredibly one-sided here considering that the case is still unresolved. No doubt it will be damaging to the doctor's reputation even if he is cleared of wrongdoing.

...which is why he is an idiot, with an idiot lawyer, for poking this hornets' nest. I say that even if we stipulate that his medical performance was exemplary. You don't fight with disgruntled customers. Spend a couple of minutes to see if you can easily satisfy them, and then forget the whole mess. Recover any products they received, give them their money back, and write off the service you performed. Period.

Perhaps this was not just a disgruntled customer. She's accused of posting multiple reviews that say allegedly libelous things. This was not, according to the complaint, a situation where someone just left a bad review.

So she is "super-disgruntled". If anything that makes fighting with her even more foolish. Most of these sites (certainly yelp and google) allow service providers to respond to reviews. Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational, but maybe there has to be a sort of compromise between one's emotions and one's business. There's no way a patient with a complaint about fees gets a lawyer on contingency or a guest column in the paper if she already has been offered a refund. This is different than a malpractice injury case, which would need to be handled more carefully. (Although even in those cases, getting the patient to accept a refund is golden.) Still, the attorney from your malpractice insurer would also advise against this scorched-earth bullshit. This physician must be on a bare-bones malpractice plan, that his dipshit attorney hasn't already been banished by competent legal representation.

[0] if the provider has to issue such refunds all the time, there are other problems to address...

> Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational

She accused him of committing felonious fraud; seeing the doctor respond by giving her her money back and saying "most people don't have a problem" would not cast that doctor in a good light at all, to me. I'm not really sure if there's any kind of response they could have left that would feel reassuring to me: recommending the client contact law enforcement like someone else suggested might help a little, but not that much. The presence of a review with accusations like that that the doctor shrugged off or dealt with casually would be infinitely more offputting to me than hearing the doctor had previously won a libel case against a former client.

Let's stipulate that there is nothing the physician could say in response to a fraud accusation that would cause you personally to doubt that accusation. That seems a novel combination of the judgmental and the credulous, but life takes all sorts. It would still be better for the physician, for you to have this reaction while reading Yelp than for hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers to be reading TFA.

The longterm difference seems pretty minimal to me: they google his name and see reviews accusing him of fraud or they google his name and see tabloid articles about this story that say the same thing the reviews did, but add that the person making the accusations was sued for libel, alongside followup reports that the court decided the woman was lying. In the second case, the bad reports jump out more, but they're accompanied with notes that a court decided they were false, whereas with your Yelp responses the doctor wasn't even denying them. I don't think your approach is obviously better for the doctor when someone's looking up reviews of him in 5 years.

If it happened.

The story is in a tabloid, and that's such an insanely egregious breach of HIPAA that I'm a little skeptical that it played out exactly like that.

Perhaps not exactly. But of all the tabloids, the NY Post has to be one of the most reputable.

I contend that all tabloids are disreputable.

Well technically tabloids are just newspapers of a certain size.

Right, there's a big difference between tabloids like The NY Post, "red tops" like The Sun, and supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer.

Exactly. Putting the Post in the same basket as the National Enquirer is an insult to Alexander Hamilton.

why do you blame the tabloid? The quote said "They posted my", so it looks likely that it was the woman who said it, no?

It's the responsibility of the journalist to ask follow-up questions that are necessary to resolve these kinds of ambiguity.

> why do you blame the tabloid?

Because a common tabloid tactic is posting technically true statements in a misleading manner.

For example, the woman's statement could apply to having introduced her medical records into the court transcripts, which would be entirely normal practice. The wording in the article leaves us thinking they uploaded her records and driver's license in a Yelp reply or something, but I think that's unlikely.

There's no HIPAA breach in the publishing of the article unless the information is being provided by a covered entity or business associate. Most notably, patients can disclose anything they desire about themselves.

The patient claims the following in the article:

> [The doctor's office] posted my entire medical record, including notes about my mental health, my bills, my insurance info, my driver’s license, birth date and home address.

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