Well, I received my annual HIPAA training yesterday. That’s the patient privacy act that is supposed to protect your personal medical history from everyone except the federal government.

Everyone in the office was required to sit for the one hour session. Everyone heard all the hoopla. Everyone signed the piece of paper required to confirm that we received the training. All the management personnel had smiles on their faces.

Now everyone can go back to pretending we give a crap and perform the real job of caring for our patients. Or at least that’s what I am going to do.

The training was steeped in threats and warnings about someone who released a file somewhere and has yet to be found. They are apparently rotting away in some government prison somewhere because they released information to an old man about the condition of his wife when he returned from work to find that she had been taken to the hospital scenario.

Everyone pretended to be concerned. Each of us knowing that we would give the man the information regardless of what management or some federal mandate spelled out. Why? Because we care.

We are not stupid. We all know that we can’t release personal information. I just wish our company spent a fraction of the time they waste on HIPAA teaching our staff how to perform customer service.