Dying in the E.R., and on TV Without His Family’s Consent
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If this isn't a massive HIPAA violation then it SHOULD Be. The fact his wife and likely others could identify him just proves that simply blurring out his face does not protect his privacy(!).
Blaming the family just makes me hate these people. They're profiting off of the misery and suffering of others (see the quote by the hospital PR guy earlier in the article), and it is wrong.
But the US is all about profit over people so this kind of thing is just a natural progression of what is already going on in all kinds of areas.
> The family did not know until the episode was broadcast that a camera was focusing on the closed door of the room where they had gathered and that audio of Dr. Schubl was being recorded.
That is got to be illegal, right..? If not that is super immoral.
These people have absolutely no conscience at all. The doctor should have their medical licence reviewed for serious ethical lapses.
you would choose the second one, because of its name?
I'm still curious of how carefully selected the publicly available positive statistics on an hospital having a marketing department and operating on a competitive basis are.
So, i say I don't know because there is voice --which they should have filtered out.
You misspelled "American".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_in_A%26E
Of course, with the NHS there is a general feel good factor in that we get to see our tax money being used to do good. Indeed I have seen criticisms of 24 Hours in A&E that because it generally shows the NHS is a positive light and as the NHS is pretty unashamedly a socialist endeavor that shows likes this are politically biased!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPA_%28TV_series%29 http://www.9jumpin.com.au/show/rpa/episodes/
I mean honestly, how mentally challenged do you have to be to think any organization is going to enter an agreement like that and not set restrictions on the tone.
Would you willingly let someone into your house to film you without them agreeing to make you look good? Would you agree if they told you they were going to cut it so all the audience sees is you arguing with your wife and kids?
So it's either going to be positive or not exist, and that's not because it's the NHS.
TV is shit. we all know it. we all say it when we want to sound cultured. whenever i hear someone expressing shock at content or attaching specific cultures to TV themes i must always wonder at the size of the rock they live under.
However, I have never owned a TV — though, yes Jules, I am aware that there is an invention called television, and that , on that invention, they show shows.
Also, for my own curiosity, could you actually name the French show you were referring to?
Not only am I bad at joking, it seems I am also bad at apologizing for it.
Sorry HN.
Is there no expectation of privacy from news crews? I thought they could only film in public - a private hospital room should certainly not count.
Anyone have a copy of what the appellate court wrote? (Or can summarize their argument?)
As I understand it, it's legally best to get signed papers from the people involved, or limit filming to public places. But there are ways to broadcast something even if it was filmed in a private area and you don't have permission of the person filmed. The most obvious thing to do is to blur out the person's face, which the show did here. I believe that there is an exception for "hot news" items (although this obviously didn't involve hot news) and there are always obvious arguments about freedom of the press.
This is mainly an area of state law, so the rules will be different across the US. The two big issues are right of publicity and right of privacy ( http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity , http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Privacy ). The hospital is apparently arguing that New York's right of publicity doesn't cover this case. I have no idea if that is correct.
HIPAA also comes into the picture (federal law, with many similar state laws). I'm certainly no expert on HIPAA, but it seems to me that the obvious argument would be that the hospital didn't release any private medical information, and if the hospital is held responsible for information revealed by the show, the "medical information" was along the lines of "he's dead" and not "he has an STD that he'd prefer to keep private."
This is a case where it's asking how the law applies, how the law should apply, and what kind of reaction the general public should have. The show was certainly insensitive to the family, and the hospital's reputation should take a severe hit. And that applies regardless of what laws might have been broken.
The definition of Protected Health Information (PHI) is interpreted broadly, such that the fact that a patient was in the ER due to an accident, received certain types of treatment and died is protected.
Meanwhile, the definition of what is personally identifiable (i.e., ties information about condition/treatment to a specific person) includes an 18-point list of potential identifiers; responsible practice is to remove all of these prior to making information public. That 18-point list includes both the geographic location of the treatment (should not be given in any form more specific than the state) and the date of treatment (should not be given in a form more specific than the year).
So I can see a strong argument that the hospital is on the wrong side of HIPAA here. And given that their argument seems mostly to be "it wasn't Our Hospital Medical Services, Inc., it was Our Hospital TV News Productions, Inc., and that one isn't covered by HIPAA", I'd begin to suspect they believe it would be a HIPAA violation for the hospital, too.
Saying that, I've never worked with any producer that wouldn't see that as a huge red flag (although I haven't worked much in reality tv either in quite a few years).
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-co...
Could a news report about vehicle-pedestrian accidents use that footage, even without the victim's permission?
I suspect probably so, for its illustrative value. As a matter of sensitivity to viewers or the victim's family, they might blur any particularly gory details, or the precise identifying characteristics of the victim or others involved.
And that's roughly what they did in the hospital, too. The crew was filming in an area they had permission to, and blurred identifying details. A very small number of people – who knew the incident, the hospital, the doctor, the victim – could work out who was being shown. That's emotionally draining, perhaps, but I'm not sure it's legally tortious, and requiring a court-enforced remedy.
"...the state does not recognize a common law right to privacy and... any privacy right Mr. Chanko did have ended upon his death."
"The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual"
http://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2014/2014_07954.ht...
I suppose a simple step forward would be to require that a broadcaster that is owned by a cable company must offer the channels individually (which probably wouldn't impact Disney, but a Comcast subsidiary shouldn't be using channel bundles to extract revenue from Comcast competitors).
I think it wouldn't impact Disney because they aren't really a player in traditional distribution (but they play online with a stake in Hulu and other efforts, but those are sort of already unbundled, I think because they envision better revenues that way).
The economics of cable (and satellite) aren't obvious: it really doesn't cost any more to offer 150 channels instead of 100. The signal for every channel the cable company offers makes it to your house, and the cable company's equipment filters out the channels that you haven't paid for.
There's no reason to think it will cost less to get those channels filtered out one at a time instead of as bundles.
film and television are made all over the place. we have shitty people in charge just like every industry. there are nebulous regions in terms of legality just like every industry. there is always more to the story than what you are watching in "your" programs.
This is one time I hope their lawyers turn the screws on these corporations and extract as much capital as possible.
Because their lawyers said they had a chance at extracting money. Make no mistake; this is about money and pride. People get filmed dying nearly every day, and much of that death reel finds its way to the Public. These people have the means and, though this is a complete guess on my part, the experience to wage a lawsuit battle with a Hospital, a Production Company, and a Doctor.
I am very familiar with the heartlessness required to produce TV, especially reality TV. I hate it every time some dipshit redneck violates a suspect's rights on COPS by being vague, or someone having a horrible day gets mocked by the by-standers as their crappy car gets towed. We are a culture that indulges in the misery of others. Just because a few rich people tasted what everyone from low income areas eat for breakfast does not seem to me a good reason to flip the table and hunt down camera people.
It's hard to imagine a system more effective at upsetting people than the US legal system. There's a good chance that the family brought the doctor into the suit to get money from his insurance company. But they may not have had much choice. In the US, the court will spend a lot of time trying to decide if the right people were sued, and if people should be dropped or others added. I don't see how the doctor would have avoided getting sucked into the suit.
The lawyers will spend a lot of time negotiating behind the scenes. The family will try to get the judge to declare any liability "joint and several" which would allow the family to collect the full judgment (assuming there is one) from any of the parties, who then can work out the details among themselves.
The system encourages, and in some cases requires, this kind of manuevering. So don't assume the people involved are actually this weird, mean or heartless.
classicsnoot mentions that the doctor "physically did everything he could to help their dead relative" but that very obviously didn't include helping to preserve his patient's dignity by keeping a camera crew away from him.
What a nightmare. I'm still slightly in awe that a hospital would put their patients through this. That TV people would put someone through it is, of course, not shocking at all...
Even so, I don't see any way for the doctor to avoid being sued. But I really doubt he had much influence on the show.
It's obvious in this case that the show wasn't able to get permission from the family (and, given that the family was surprised; the show wasn't able to contact the family), so they blurred the guy's face and thought that made him unidentifiable. I don't believe the doctor had any influence on that decision.
Okay, think about that. Just the thought of making critically injured people or their families deal with that (are they confronted by a release form? do they even get a choice, or do they have to go to a different ER if they want to receive treatment with some privacy? WTF?) is completely disgusting. The whole thing is trash that no medical professional should be involved in at all.
In any case, it doesn't take an enormous amount of moral courage to say "there is no possible way this person or his family has consented to being filmed so I'm taking the microphone off and you are taking your cameras out of the room."
I'm sure a resident might have reasons to be intimidated. I'm sure there was also an attending physician.
Most medical incidents are recorded, many of them in multiple different formats. Your use of the term "TV people" is rather informative. Then again, you 'software people' are typically pretty obtuse when it comes to subjects outside of your collective and therefore indistinguishable command.