Will Changing Privacy Laws Help Patients?

Over on Twitter, one of my pals, @namipolicywonk wrote: I'm a big proponent of civil rights, but whose rights are we protecting in a situation like this? http://thebronxchronicle.com/2016/04/03/op-ed-eliot-engel-side-families-seriously-mentally-ill-not-mental-health-industry/ …Please do read the article, but in a few sentences, here's the synopsis.  A mom is writing an oped piece about her daughter who lives in a group home in New York and has a chronic mental illness.  The daughter went missing from her group home, off her medications, and reportedly because of HIPAA laws, the group home did not tell the parents the daughter was missing. In fact, they repeatedly said she was "not home," which in my book is dishonest.  The story gets worse, the police initially wouldn't take a report, and eventually the daughter was located 28 days later in a shelter in a terribly deteriorated state.  If that's not bad enough: the daughter was on Assisted Outpatient Treatment (the mom call's it Kendra's Law ) and known to be dangerous off her medications, so she was court-ordered to treatment, and the group home still didn't report this to the parent or the police for some prolonged period of time.  The point of the article is a plug for Rep. Tim Murphy's Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act, now stalled in Congress, because the mom contends that if this law passed then the group home would have had to release information to her and they could have help...
Source: Shrink Rap - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Source Type: blogs