That’s not true. HIPAA covers anyone handling protected health information in a professional manner. If some office clerk at the VA is mailing out copies of HIPAA-protected information, they’re bound by HIPAA. If a consulting IT firm has access to a hospital’s servers as they’re changing something about the EHR, they’re bound by HIPAA. Protected information cannot make its way from a “covered entity” to a non-covered entity like a totally unrelated bakery who would not have an obligation to protect your information without either: 1) violating the law, 2) you personally disclosing the information to the non-protected party, or 3) you or someone authorized on your behalf signing a disclosure waiver permitting the covered entity to disclose

Could you elaborate on what you mean?

4th year medical student. AI is not ready to be making any diagnostic or therapeutic decisions. What I do think we’re just about ready for is simply making notes faster to write. Discharge summaries especially, could be the first real step AI takes into healthcare. For those unaware, a discharge summary is a chronological description of all the major events in a patient’s hospitalization that explain why they presented, how they were diagnosed, any complications that arose, and how they were treated. They are just summaries of all of the previous daily notes that were written by the patient’s doctors. An AI could feasibly only pull data from these notes, rephrasing for clarity and succinctness, and save doctors 10-20 minutes of writing on every discharge they do.

Works for PhD’s, but try doing oral exams for 1000 Bio101 students.