My son is in the hospital. He’s 12. The tech team was saying they needed permission from the son to grant access or have a healthcare proxy
Fortunately accounting was able to give us access. If a 12 yo can have sole access to their medical records, then they should have sole responsibility to pay the bill. The billing dept was awesome
It’s awkward that a hospital has rules where a 12 year old can deny access to the parents. Any chance this is because of kids trying to gender transition?
That is just nuts.
I thought that a parent didn’t need permission to speak to a doctor if the child was a minor.
That’s not a problem. It was accessing the patient portal to get doctor / nurse notes
It wouldn’t be because of trans issues, at least not directly. There are situations, such as pregnancy, STDs, abortion, etc., in which minors have rights and can overrule parents or prevent access. Differs by state. Here’s some info for CA.
It’s useful to remember that some parents are bonkers.
First, no, it’s not about gender transition. Second, it sounds like it’s more about the portal that getting records thru the hospital. I worked with HIPAA for years and that law basically insures that lawyers will live a comfortable life. I found a site from a law firm discussing it and found this:
Generally, anyone under eighteen is considered a minor and cannot legally exercise their rights under HIPAA. Instead, HIPAA considers the minor’s parent or guardian to be their “personal representative.” The Privacy Rule authorizes a personal representative to exercise the minor’s HIPAA rights on their behalf. Thus, for the most part, parents have access to their minor children’s medical records, and turning over a minor’s confidential health information to a parent is generally not a violation of HIPAA laws.
There are certain times that they won’t release medical records.
The problem with HIPAA, even all these years after it was introduced, is that some people/institutions are so gun shy about potential lawsuits that they err on the side of caution. When HIPAA first came out, individuals and institutions would face a fine and potential jail time. Then some congressman had the bright idea to let individuals sue the institution for monetary damages, which only made those gun shy entities tighten up even more.
I was in public health for 20 years and we had a Family Planning clinic. If a minor came in for birth control, we didn’t need parental consent and could not divulge it to the parents without the minor authorizing it. Some could argue that this policy is wrong, but I tend to think that a minor child that faces tons of pressure to have sex, but the extent of their parents sex education efforts consisted of a purity pledge, then that kid is aware of their potential weakness to give in and is demonstrating some very good “personal responsibility” to insure that they don’t get pregnant.
The only disclosure that we could give…that we were REQUIRED to give, is if a girl that was 14 or under tested positive for pregnancy, and in that case we were required to notify law enforcement.
Hope he gets well soon.
Thanks. We’re actually hoping for a longer stay as he has a lot to work on to get / be better. We don’t need him relapsing and/or unready to come home
That’s good. Some parents, who believe their child should have kept their legs together might want to coerce their child into having an abortion
ACtually, their parents are likely antiabortion as well…so their kid is doing something so that there won’t be a need for abortion. Planned Parenthood provided a lot more contraceptives than they did abortion, but when we defunded them, it’s gotten a bit harder to get the contraception that the purity pledge parents also oppose.
This is actually extremely sad: children needing to make adult decisions including conceiving a child and the emotional ramifications for keeping, adopting, or having an abortion that child.
Despite all the tans bullshit, it takes years to modify HIPAA to not disclose information to parents. The verbiage in Title X Family Planning is the one that prevents parental notification, not HIPAA.
@smartpolitics Smart politics - I am so sorry to hear about your son’s medical issues and hope that the treatment he is getting at the hospital will be helpful.
Thank you. Hopefully now that the weekend is over, the unit is reaching out to my sons providers to help / modify the plan as needed. My concern is he might have too much control over his care plan as he’s 12 but they’ve reached out a couple times
Our plan is to have him go to a day hospital and see a developmental pediatrician for genetic testing to show we have a plan to meet his special needs including locks and alarms.
Definitely don’t know the plan. Part of it is meeting his goals to vocalize but part of it is where he’s totally unsafe to come home and needs to be there
Hopefully he’ll be in the hospital until we can find a partial hospitalization program to help him stabilize
We will find out on Thursday if it’s discharge date. He’s definitely not ready and is definitely unstable
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