Greg Fliszar was quoted in The Citizens' Voice discussing what hospitals and health systems can release publicly regarding coronavirus due to HIPAA. Greg said HIPAA allows hospitals and health systems to publicly release “de-identified information” on patients or cases. There are 18 different identifying factors that must be stripped from a patient’s medical record for it to be considered de-identified, including names, geographic subdivisions, ages and other details, he said. “(Hospitals) could potentially say we’ve got 10 cases, but they couldn’t really get more granular than that,” Fliszar said. “They couldn’t say ‘we’ve got six females (and) 10 males. We’ve got 20 people over the age of 55.’ You really can’t do that.”

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