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When Paula Stannard, one of the federal government’s top healthcare privacy officials, visited her eye doctor this year, she was asked to sign a form, acknowledging she’d received a privacy notice about how the office would use her health data.
“Had I received the notice of privacy practices? No,” she told an audience at one of the nation’s largest health industry conferences in March.
“I did not want to tell them who I was and why they should not be doing that,” said Stannard, who is director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “But I did write a note that says, ‘I have not received this. I am not acknowledging receipt.’”
Stannard’s story is all too common.
