The Information Blocking (IB) Rule is intended to work in sync with HIPAA, including the “right of access” the Privacy Rule grants to patients with regard to access to their own protected health information (PHI).  However, as I continue to analyze how to implement various standards that overlap between these two regulations, questions about how to thread the needle on seemingly conflicting standards continues to come up. Today, I take a closer look at the difference between HIPAA’s “right of access” as compared to the Preventing Harm Exception found in the IB Rule. Specifically, this post considers how a covered entity health care provider . . .

As the November 2nd deadline for compliance with ONC’s Information Blocking Rule nears, many health care providers – which are “Actors” subject to the Rule – are scrambling to reexamine their default settings for sharing various types of data, including lab results. In ONC’s Final Rule preamble, several commenters indicated that providers’ current organizational policies call for practices that delay the release of laboratory results so that the patient’s clinician has an opportunity to review the results before potentially needing to respond to patient questions, or has an opportunity to communicate the results to the patient in a way that builds the clinician-patient relationship.