June 2009

Executive summary
The Privacy Commissioner has conducted an inquiry into the practice of some insurance companies of collecting full medical notes for a specified number of years.

The inquiry concludes that insurers that collect full medical notes - even for a specified period - are at risk of breaching the Health Information Privacy Code. This is because insurers can only collect personal health information that is necessary to make insurance decisions, such as calculating whether to insure someone or whether to pay out on a claim.

Insurers do need to collect detailed medical information to make insurance decisions, and their clients need to be completely open and honest about that information. However, this should usually take the form of asking for answers to particular questions. Not all the information contained in medical notes is necessarily relevant to an insurance decision. For instance, medical notes may contain family or relationship information - the medical practitioner may have treated a person as a whole, in their individual circumstances and context. This will not always be relevant to the decisions the insurer has to make about cover or claims.

Occasionally, an insurer will be entitled to collect full medical notes, if the more specific information does not provide the detail the insurer needs to make the decision. However, these situations should be rare.

FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.privacy.org.

Similar posts: electronic health record