Blown Cover Over Jason Pierre-Paul’s Medical Privacy
by Arthur L. Caplan & Lee H. Igel
NYU Sports & Society
Like millions of Americans celebrating the Fourth of July, Jason Pierre-Paul marked the holiday by being in a place where people were setting off fireworks. Like many thousands of them, he ended up in the hospital because the fireworks were mishandled and there was an accident. It resulted in a finger on his right hand being amputated. As news, shouldn’t this pale in comparison to the guy who died after lighting a firework off his head? Not in this case.
Pierre-Paul’s case normally is the stuff of mishaps noted in local newscasts. But when you are a starting defensive end for the New York Giants, as Pierre-Paul has been for the past several years, it becomes headline news. The troubling thing here, though, is that the only reason his injury is in the news at all is because someone leaked Pierre-Paul’s medical records to the press.
ESPN reporter Adam Schefter got a hold of Pierre-Paul’s medical chart and posted a picture of it to Twitter. If he didn’t get the chart from the patient but did from a staff member at the hospital, that employee and the institution are in violation of a portion of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. A main purpose of that federal law, enacted in 1996, is to protect the confidentiality and security of individual patient’s health care information.
The public has grown accustomed to knowing a lot about the health status of professional athletes. For example, did you know that Pierre-Paul’s hands are 10 3/8” long? They are at least according to NFL.com, which includes that type of information about participants in the the NFL Combine. Teams release injury reports each week. Coaches and players talk about injuries in press conferences and media interviews. And then there are the troves of information about players as they make their way from college into the professional ranks.
So, why all the uproar about Pierre-Paul’s injury and hospitalization information making its way to Twitter and beyond?
Somebody presumably gave Schefter information that he never should have been given. Schefter then decided to put it into the public discourse rather than keep it to himself. There is an argument that he was just doing his job as a journalist. But if Pierre-Paul didn’t consent to his medical records being handed to Schefter, the journalist is now dealing in stolen information. He may not be in violation of HIPAA, but he is arguably in violation of good sense.
This episode also brings to bear how people use social media and the capacity for all sorts of information to be disseminated to the public. There is a great temptation for its users to post messages and images in as close to real-time as possible. For a journalist, this means “getting the scoop.” For a patient, it means “you violated my right to privacy.”
Pierre-Paul has plenty to deal with in the days, weeks, and months to come. Professionally, he will have to convince team executives that he can continue playing at a level that garnered him a recent long-term, $60-million contract offer. Personally, he will have to work his way through extensive physical and psychological rehabilitation for an injury that isn’t as minor as it might appear to be. What we know about all this should be up to him to tell—not his doctors, nurses, or any reporters.
Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center. Lee H. Igel, PhD, is associate professor in the Tisch Institute at New York University. Both are affiliated with the NYU Sports and Society program.
Source: Forbes
