Claire O’Brien

speaker

161 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Claire O’Brien’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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AHLA's Speaking of Health Law · What Health Care Providers Should Know When Responding to Subpoenas or Other Legal Demands · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

Um a subpoena issued by someone other than a

Judge, for example, a court clerk or an attorney in a case requires a different approach.

Specifically, that you can only respond to the subpoena if you receive satisfactory assurances that the party seeking the information either has made reasonable efforts to notify the individual uh who is the subject of the PHI, or satisfactory assurances that the party seeking the information has made reasonable efforts to secure a protective order.

And that protective order needs to satisfy HIPAA's requirements.

And Terry, maybe it would be helpful for our listeners to hear more about what exactly it means to have satisfactory assurances because that term is defined in the HIPAA regulations.

And that makes sense because we don't want to have information that would be protected by HIPAA when it's, you know, in the files of the healthcare provider to lose all those protections just because there's a litigation going on and some party thinks they need those records.

Uh well definitely it would not be correct to produce everything in your possession related to the patient whose information is the subject of the demand.

So if you have a court order and it requests just a specific part of the patient record, you should only send that specific part of the patient record.

It would be improper to send the entire patient record, even if that's maybe easier for you.

Um similarly in responding to a subpoena, the provider should only produce the minimum necessary information to accomplish the intended purpose of the request.

And minimum necessary is also a defined concept in the HIPAA rules.

It's a key protection of the privacy rule and it requires a context specific analysis of what information should be disclosed.

And so in practice, this could require applying redactions maybe to portions of documents that are not responsive to the demand.

So it's not the case that you can say, oh, you know, a HIPAA exception applies.

I'm gonna send all the records out the door.

You still need to do additional work to make sure you're compliant with the law.

Are there other exceptions under the HIPAA regulations that would permit disclosure of PHI even without patient authorization?

We talked about this a little bit already.

Yeah.

I'm glad you said that about going back to the regulations because I also go back to the rule every time uh and look to double check.

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