Doctor-Patient Confidentiality
Background: my mom worked at a very small hospital in a very small town for 30+ years and is close to most of the doctors, nurses, and office workers, not only in the hospital but around the whole town as well.
My GP, who I have seen since I was ~10 years old, is one of the people my mother is close with. I moved away for college when I was 18 but continued seeing him due to just not wanting to mess with finding a new GP and my mom wanting me to continue seeing him, since I’ve seen him half my life.
I get routine blood work done to measure how my liver is doing as well as monitor the levels of a certain medication I take to make sure that I’m not getting too little/too much.
The results of this information or the fact that I have those tests done isn’t a big secret I want to keep, they don’t really mean anything unless I were to become sick and they don’t test for information, like say illicit drugs.
The first time I had this work done, I hadn’t been to that doctor in a while to really remember if this had happened in the past, but they called my mom with my results. They even told her specifics, like what my liver enzymes were and what the medication level was.
Again, it’s not like to my mother this is anything I want to hide, but it was a little concerning that she got the call and I never received any call about my results.
I go in for these monthly, so the next month that I went I told the woman working in the lab of the office that I wanted to update my information to make sure I got the results. I thought also since I had been seeing this doctor since I was 10, I probably had never given them my phone number. A few days later, it happened again.
My mother again got the call and called to tell me my results; I again got no call from the office. Once again, not a big deal, but since this happened when I explicitly gave my phone number in place of my mother’s, I was a little ticked off that I wasn’t called again.
I chose to wait until my next lab work to say anything again anyway. At this visit, I had both lab work and an appointment to get a refill on birth control. My doctor asked me to do a pregnancy test in with this blood work due to me running out of said birth control a few days earlier.
I wasn’t worried that I was pregnant, but I knew that now it was serious time to make them stop calling my mom with my results. I asked the lady drawing my blood to confirm my phone number to see if it even got put in last time.
It did, so on my way out I stopped to talk to the women who always work in the office/at the desk and tell them explicitly that I and I alone want to be called for my results, not my mother. They nonchalantly agreed and I asked them to check my phone number on the system they use in the office, and it was there.
I happened to be visiting in town during this time and staying with my mom, who, you guessed it, got the phone call right in front of me telling her my results, including the negative pregnancy test. That’s when my mom BLEW UP at me.
She starts asking why I needed to take a pregnancy test, even though I didn’t think this was a big deal especially since it was negative. That all blew over, but at this point I was so mad that she kept getting this information. I ended up getting into it with my mom, telling her that that was a direct breach of HIPAA and she knows it after working in a hospital.
She laughed it off and said something about the doctor knowing me since I was born, her being friends with the office ladies and the doctor, and the one that hit me the most: “It’s not a big deal, I’m your mom!” Since then, I’ve been getting my lab work done elsewhere.
To no surprise, there are no issues. I don’t really know what to do here. Since I cut ties with that doctor, I no longer have personal problems with this, but I don’t want him to do it to anyone else. Story credit: Reddit / nuokkjhnkookjn