> So after my regular clinical shifts in the emergency department the other week, I anonymized my History of Present Illness notes for 35 to 40 patients — basic

> So after my regular clinical shifts in the emergency department the other week, I anonymized my History of Present Illness notes for 35 to 40 patients — basically, my detailed medical narrative of each person’s medical history, and the symptoms that brought them to the emergency department — and fed them into ChatGPT. It's quite shocking that the doctor would openly admit to violating HIPAA in such a brazen way. HIPAA is incredibly broad in its definition of protected health information: if it's possible to identify an individual from data even through statistical methods involving other data that a third party might already conceivably possess, it's considered protected. It's inconceivable that the doctor would be able to sufficiently anonymize the data in this capacity and still provide enough detail for individual diagnoses. There are processes for anonymizing data to disclose for research purposes, but they're pretty time-intensive, and no ED would allow a doctor to do it by himself, nor would they provide that turnaround in just "a couple of weeks". And the end results are a lot less detailed than what's needed for individual diagnoses like these. I really wonder what the hospital will say if and when they see this post. Given the timeframe and details described in the post, it's really hard to believe that they signed off on this, and hospitals don't take lightly to employees taking protected and confidential data outside their systems without proper approval. EDIT: It looks like this doctor works at a for-profit, standalone acute care clinic, rather than a traditional ED at a hospital, so my statement that hospitals don't take lightly to this stuff doesn't apply. The law still applies to for-profit standalone emergency care, but they tend to play fast and loose with these things much more than traditional health networks.