Imagine that you are a health care provider covered by the HIPAA privacy rule. Also imagine that your patient shares with you certain aspects of her family’s medical history which may be relevant to your treatment of the patient. Finally, imagine that another health care provider later asks you to disclose all or some of that patient’s family medical history for purposes of treating one of those family members.

Once you have this family medical history in your records, are you allowed to disclose it in the same manner, and under the same circumstances, that you’d be free to disclose the patient’s personal “protected health information” without first obtaining the consent of the family members whose medical history now rests in your records? Well, apparently you can. So says the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights (“OCR”) in a new HIPAA “Frequently Asked Questions” (“FAQ”) document released on January 7, 2009.

The HIPAA privacy rule limits how covered health care providers may use or disclose protected health information (“PHI”) of their patients. However, under that rule, a provider may disclose PHI (except psychotherapy notes) to third parties for purposes of treatment, payment and certain health care operations purposes, without obtaining the consent of the patient to the PHI disclosure. According to OCR, when a covered health care provider obtains a patient’s family medical history, that information becomes part of the patient’s medical record, and his PHI. Thus, any HIPAA privacy rights in that information belong to the patient, not his family members. OCR also says that the privacy rule’s authorization to disclose PHI, without consent of the patient, for purposes of “treatment” extends to treatment of others besides just the patient who provided the information, including members of his family. So, a provider may disclose a patient’s family medical history to another health care provider for purposes of treating the patient’s family member without consent of the patient or the family member.